LWN: Comments on "A tempest in a toybox"

A tempest in a toybox

shentino — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:06:50 +0000

Seems to me that Busybox is doing a good thing by serving as a honeypot to catch code thieves and GPL scofflaws red handed.

If people weren't so keen on trying to get away with it there wouldn't be such a problem in the first place.

About the calculus for the project

gdt — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:32:53 +0000

Cisco outsourced the old linksys Linux stuff to a taiwanese company after the first lawsuit, washed their hands of Linux...

Cisco is a big company and so generalisations like this are unwise. Cisco's next generation switch and router software uses Linux underneath, so Cisco's views on Linux are not as black and white as you portray.

About the calculus for the project

docwhat — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:15:24 +0000

Huh? Your legal theory is pretty out there. Do you have anything to back this up? Anything at all?

About the calculus for the project

bronson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:27:46 +0000

This is true. But I don't think Rob is calling all GPL zealots insane...? That's just a tiny subset.

About the calculus for the project

bronson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:18:09 +0000

> If it's goal is to conceal an infringement - then it's illegal.

That's obviously not its goal.

And, even if it were, it still wouldn't be illegal. If you disagree, please state your case law. Napster is only relevant as a trivial example of failing "significant non-infringing" and has nothing to do with software licensing.

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:05:06 +0000

this topic has now made it's way onto a very select list, the list of free software / open source related lawsuits that I would like to see happen on the basis that the people making the claim are doing enough harm with their FUD that a lawsuit to set a precedent would be a good thing.

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:57:56 +0000

claiming that software is illegal based on how some people (who aren't the authors of the software) choose to use it is a very dangerous thing to do.

This is exactly what the game console and big media companies are trying to do.

There's a very good reason that the "open source definition" requires that there be no limit on the field of use of software for a license to qualify as open source.

It's sad to see GPL proponents playing into their enemies hands by trying to declare competing software to be illegal.

About the calculus for the project

khim — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:17:59 +0000

The license under which you develop you software has nothing to do with legality of such activity as I've already explained.

If this project is supposed to solve problem of GPL copyright violation in one way or another (or if it's created to solve some other problems, not related to licensing at all) - then it's good, lawful project. If it's goal is to conceal an infringement - then it's illegal.

Now, it's easy to claim "out goals are noble and if someone will use our work for unlawful purposes then it's not our problem", but this defense will fly only if statistic will support you. If most users of your project are using it to violate rights of someone else (for example Linux kernel developers) then you'll find yourself in a hot water no matter what you'll say. Napster is prime example - and law only becomes strict over time. ACTA is just the last step on this road - and I doubt it's the final one.

The real irony here lies in the fact that SONY which pushes this expansion in the capitol and SONY which tries to "solve" it using morally-questionable tricks like relicensed toybox are the same entity - yet the logical solution (stop trying to stretch power of copyright any further) is somehow not even considered.

About the calculus for the project

armijn — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:59:36 +0000

So reimplementing standard UNIX commands under a BSD license if they only run on Linux is illegal? You lost me.

About the calculus for the project

landley — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 16:55:38 +0000

> > so if toybox can run on BSD it's legal
>
> Oh no. To make it run on BSD is only a first step. Then you need to
> convince people to actually use it in such configuration :-)
>
> If BSD port will just be a curiosity then court will [rightfully] say

*plonk*

Rob

P.S. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=plonk+usenet

About the calculus for the project

nix — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:51:19 +0000

btw, you might stand more chance of convincing people rather than repelling them if you didn't routinely call them insane. Just a thought.

About the calculus for the project

nix — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:44:18 +0000

Well, yes, except that *all* companies rapidly become a bloody mess because of accumulating history and staff turnover. It's impossible to keep in license compliance as long as any staff can drop off the face of the earth with a month's notice without documenting anything or ever communicating with the old workplace again (and, alas, that has been the tradition everywhere I've ever worked: they've routinely been shocked when I've presented them with an email address they can send queries to, FFS. Is supporting your own old stuff so radical? Apparently it is, to many people.)

About the calculus for the project

nix — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:35:31 +0000

Quite. Nobody ever looks up patents. Every large software company I have ever worked for specifically forbids its developers from doing patent searches without the cooperation of the corporation's top lawyer, which says something about how common they expect such things to be. (From asking a few such people, the number of patent searches they actually get asked to do by software developers is one or two a *year*. In large multinationals.)

About the calculus for the project

landley — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:30:37 +0000

> Rob wrote busybox replacement to solve some problems with busybox. No
> problem so far. Then later Tim comes along and convinces Rob to change the
> license citing SFC as the reason.

Except that's not what happened.

Tim was trying to start a project called "BentoBox", which most likely would extend Android's Toolbox, and if not would start over from scratch. He was doing so in his capacity as CELF guy (not a Sony guy) because a number of different manufacturers had approached _him_ looking for such a thing, and he thought that pooling their resources was better than each of them writing yet another half-assed bsd-licensed not-busybox (toolbox, bsdbox, beastiebox, sbase, who knows how many private ones behind closed doors?)

Initially, I told him I wasn't interested. And then I thought about it and went "A _billion_ android devices. They've already had five years to ship busybox and didn't. Something is going to fill that market vacuum, and when it does it will be BIG."

I also thought: I really liked working on toybox, I only stopped because I didn't think anybody would ever use the result, because no matter how technically better I make it, it would have to displace an existing "good enough" solution with a ten year headstart including years of my own work. But... market vacuum. Billions of seats. They're going to use SOMETHING...

Tim still hasn't paid me a dime, and may never do so. (I'd love it if he _did_, but that's not why I restarted Toybox.)

I am the one who chose to relicense toybox. I didn't wait for Tim to decide to redirect his bentobox thing, I didn't wait for anybody to come up with any money, or a marketing campaign, or even a promise to use it instead of going off and doing something else that would compete with it.

I decided that Toybox should be restarted as a BSD-licensed project (Tim was proposing Apache license for bentobox). It was my code, I'm the only one who _could_ relicense it, and I'm certainly the only one who could make me work on it.

I am not Tim's puppet. And I'm not your puppet either. I've been programming since I was 12, releasing the results for free since almost that long (300 baud modem to BBS's: the first program I wrote and uploaded was "The Bard's Tailor", an editor for C64 bard's tale game save files), and doing so as open source since 1998. I didn't even MEET Tim until 2006.

That's the annoying assumption here, that some large company is pulling the strings, it's a conspiracy! In reality, large companies haven't had time to REACT to any of this. Tim made a proposal Sony has yet to even _evaluate_, and he works for them! Fortune 500 corporations move very, very slowly. They haven't noticed this project EXISTS yet. I may have 1.0 out before they do.

Rob

P.S. And please: Tim citing SFC at _me_? I fell out with SFLC before SFC forked off from them, I was very public about it in my blog, and have linked those old blog entries here ad nauseam. The no GPL in userspace thing is an Android policy which my _current_ employer (Polycom, I work in board bringup which has nothing to do with any of this) has adopted itself for Android products it ships (basically all new ones). I.E. the team I personally work on at my day job does board bringup in vanilla-ish Linux (A TI fork thereof, anyway; we recently got to upgrade to 2.6.37!), and then once we've made all the hardware work the prototypes get reformatted and handed off to a completely separate set of developers who install an android kernel (again from TI) and userspace, and write a Java GUI that runs in Dalvik and gets packaged into an apk file to install into Android. Those guys can't use _any_ GPL stuff in userspace. The only reason _we_ get to is that none of the userspace code we write ever _ships_. We're mostly just figuring out which wires aren't connected up right and which existing drivers don't do what we need them to so the vendor (TI) can fix 'em.

On the 'death penalty' thing

corbet — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:18:14 +0000

In the interest of clarity, it's worth repeating an important point here:

If somebody is shipping Busybox (or another GPL-licensed program), and they did not ship the source along with a binary distribution, then any third party is entitled to ask for the source. Having bought the box (or not) does not play into the picture in any way.

That said, third parties have no standing to legally enforce that requirement. Only the copyright holders can do that. The SFC, by virtue of representing copyright holders (and, possibly, being a copyright holder itself), has the standing to initiate this sort of action.

About the calculus for the project

khim — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:39:37 +0000

Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ...

She had FAR more lifeboats than were legally required.

Sure. Law required just 16 lifeboats while Titanic had 20. With total capacity of 1,178 people on a ship with capacity of 3,547. Less then ⅓ space per person. Good idea. Not.

And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...)

That's another issue. Yes, even if you have enough lifeboats you still can lose a lot of lives in a case of crush. But if you don't have enough lifeboats to save all passengers then loss of life is inevitable.

I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds.

Sure. More then one space per person may be good idea. How much more is subject of the debate. Less then one space per person is pointless - and this is exactly how Titanic was equipped.

About the calculus for the project

Wol — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:35:53 +0000

Actually, that's not fair on Titanic ...

She had FAR more lifeboats than were legally required.

And could have saved a lot more people, if they hadn't messed up evacuating the boat. Plus a load of people didn't want to get on the lifeboats because they felt safer staying on board (pretty much the same as happened in the recent cruise-ship sinking in Italy ...)

(I think the law nowadays says you need enough spaces on EACH SIDE of the boat for the entire passenger/crew complement - ie 2 spaces per person. Most boats carry even more. It makes sense, actually, if the boat is listing you can lose half your usable lifeboat capacity in the space of seconds.)

Cheers,
Wol

On the 'death penalty' thing

Wol — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:27:49 +0000

Well, if said defendant is shipping a box containing, amongst other things, busybox, AND THE SFC HAS BOUGHT ONE OF THOSE BOXES, then per the GPL they are entitled to a copy of the source of all the GPL programs on it.

So what they are demanding is "give us all the source we are legally entitled to".

Where it becomes a problem, and where Sony :-( has a problem with it, is they are also asking for the source for other products they may not have bought (that may well not even be on sale!).

Cheers,
Wol

Two different "risks" here

khim — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:21:30 +0000

But guess what? The team of people who were _threatening_ to sue Cisco over the GPL back in 2003? They didn't actually file suit:

http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys.html

This is factually wrong. They actually did that.

All the work was done _out_ of court, and Cisco cooperated to _keep_ themselves out of court.

As you describe in other place this "cooperation" was in form "let's sweep it under the rug, continue with sweet talk and hope FSF will eventually go away". It didn't work: FSF is extremely patient, but this is more then compensated by it's perseverance.

The threat of a GPL lawsuit was just saber rattling to get Cisco's attention, they negotiated the release of source code _without_ever_filing_suit_.

Yes. Once. And it was incomplete. And then Cisco issued new versions of both software and hardware - again with GPL violation. And as your admit when they started new "proper" effort they had no plans to do anything with old violations.

All the open drivers for chips from nvidia and ati and broadcom and such we've gotten since then happened either because a company _chose_ to be nice (like Intel, hiring the xfree86 guys to push back against microsoft a bit), or because we _reverse_engineered_them_.

Yes, but can you explain just why companies suddenly decided to be nice when they dragged their feet for years? And why are you so sure lawsuits have nothing to do with that?

All this talk about lawsuits being necessary for hardware support does not match reality, and certainly was not the goal of the guy who started the suits (I.E. me).

You may have started it, but your certainly don't have power to stop it. Simply because you don't own rights for a lot of GPLed code.

I have first person experience here: you do not.

As Kleiner said: It's difficult to see the picture when you're inside the frame. You can only talk about direct consequences of all that activity, but how can you claim that Broadcom's change of heart is not related to SFLC and SFC efforts?

You are correct when you say Never think you're _irreplacable_. Nobody is. That's certainly true. And if your goal is to make software used by millions then these lawsuits may hurt. But Stallman's initial goal was completely different: the goal was to be able to hack on the software you "own", not to spread your own software as an act of goodwill. GPL was not a goal in itself, but means to this end: if someone uses your code then GPL guarantees that you get your own code back with appropriate changes! Clever hack - but it was broken by tivoization and by blatant ignorance of GPL conditions. Solution to tivoization is obvious: GPLv3. It makes sure that manufacturer can not forbid you to modify your own code. Solution to GPL violations are lawsuits. If manufacturer does not give you enough data to start hacking on your code then what's the point of the whole exercise?

From this POV lawsuits are quite successful: a lot of companies published enough sources to make the whole classes of devices hackable. The fact that GPL stopped being the most popular license in the world is unfortunate side-effect, but alternative (GPL continues to be most popular license while manufacturers effectively treat it as BSD license) was clearly worse from FSF's POV.

P.S. It's funny that you argue are so adamantly against SFC's efforts where the only "proven disaster" happened because of FSF. FSF certainly started it's efforts way, way before your involvement. In fact G++ story happened before busybox project was even started!

On the 'death penalty' thing

Wol — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:21:06 +0000

I think the problem here is that, in most cases, once the SFLC get through to someone senior who understands the problem, the offender caves pretty quick and says "how can we put it right?".

Once the SFLC has got hold of someone who (a) has the clout to fix things, and (b) has the determination to fix things, it's pretty easy to come to an amicable solution.

The problem with Best Buy, as far as I can make out, was the only response the SFLC got was "not our problem". To the point they were finally exasperated enough to say "well it is your problem and we're going to court to make you face up to it!"

I don't know whether you have the same thing in America, but over here we have a position called "Company Secretary", of which most companies *M*U*S*T* legally have one. And one of the "perks" of the post is that if the company breaks the law, the Secretary is - *PERSONALLY* - legally liable and can be fined or imprisoned.

So over here, the equivalent of the SFLC could go to Companies House (the relevant public records office), find out who the Secretary is, and send them a registered letter. At which point he is personally on notice that he could end up in jail. He now has two choices. Pass the buck to the rest of the board, placing them on notice of jail terms, or resign. What do you think it's going to do to confidence in the Company if the Secretary resigns, giving as his reason that he doesn't want to go to jail?

Cheers,
Wol

Two different "risks" here

Cyberax — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 02:08:25 +0000

Uhm.

R300, R600 and R800 now have public documentation and open source drivers. There's a virtual SVGA driver that provides 3D acceleration to guests which is fully mainlined.

Then there's OpenSource Broadcom driver.

Basically, the only major 'bad' companies by now are NVidia and Imgtec (PowerVR developers).

About the calculus for the project

khim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:26:36 +0000

so if toybox can run on BSD it's legal

Oh no. To make it run on BSD is only a first step. Then you need to convince people to actually use it in such configuration :-)

If BSD port will just be a curiosity then court will [rightfully] say that it's existence is just a window dressing. Napster was capable of commercially significant non-infringing use - yet it was not enough, after all. But if BSD port will be used often enough then, sure, it'll mean that toybox relicense happened for other reasons besides copyright infringement facilitation.

but if it only runs on linux it's a circumvention tool and illegal

Again: nope. It's only illegal if it's only runs on linux and if a lot of companies continue to use it to violate GPL license for Linux kernel in [relative] safety.

We'll see what happens. Perhaps now, when toybox is available and SFC can not use busybox to sue shady contractors, they will suddenly wise up and all start voluntarily comply with GPL license for kernel or may be they all will switch to BSD... but I somehow doubt it'll happen.

About the calculus for the project

khim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:12:15 +0000

if you load the full series of comments and search for 'illegal' you will see it being introduced.

Please try to actually do that, Ok. You'll find that the first post is mine and it clearly states I have no problems with Rob's work.

Rob wrote busybox replacement to solve some problems with busybox. No problem so far. Then later Tim comes along and convinces Rob to change the license citing SFC as the reason. This is the point when the whole outrage started and at this point it stopped being about technically interesting rewrite of busybox and started being about legally questionable GPL infringement easement.

Only court may say for sure if such thing is legal or not, but the very fact that it's sold under "let's make sure SFC can not sue us for the violation of GPL while we continue to use identically-licensed other pieces of code" is not just morally wrong, it's highly questionable on legal grounds, too.

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:09:51 +0000

so if toybox can run on BSD it's legal, but if it only runs on linux it's a circumvention tool and illegal

suuuuure.....

About the calculus for the project

khim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:49:40 +0000

after all, what's linux but a project to let people have a unix-like system without complying with the proprietary licenses of the commercial unix systems?

… and without using any code from said unix systems. The very first goal was to make Linux self-hosted and make sure you can use it without buying license for Minix.

what's openoffice but a project to let people have an alternative to microsoft office without complying with the proprietary licenses that microsoft sells?

… and without use of any proprietary code at all. Important milestone was reached when openoffice was freed from all binary blobs.

if you go hunting for it, every opensource project can be framed in a way as to be encouraging people to avoid complying with some commercial license (the free as in beer part of freedom), and this is frequently touted as a significant reason for the open software existing by the project itself (not just a third party talking about the project like in the case of toybox)

Wow. That's certainly bold statement. What kind of proprietary software will you need to use Linux, OpenOffice.org, GCC or any other tool? All FOSS projects I know strive very hard to make sure they can be used without any proprietary software at all. And when they need some binary blob it's always a problem which is considered quite serious - and this is not the new phenomenon. Number of drivers are not in Linux's mainstream kernel simply because they need binary blobs with questionable licenses.

Compare it with project under discussion which quite explicitly is useless without GPLed components. And when asked about replacement for the other piece of puzzle the author itself noted that he honestly hadn't thought about it before. Sorry, but I find it quite hard to believe it's the same thing when people explicitly say that they want to make sure all the licenses are followed to a T and when they say "here is pile of identically licensed code which license is often violated but where some piece is more often in spotlight, let's make sure this piece is removed but keep everything else under the very some terms".

If you'll show me bazillion of companies which complied with GPL WRT to linux kernel but were still hurt by SFC then I'll take all my words back and readily admit that SFC really goes to far. So far I've not seen even one such company.

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:37:35 +0000

there are posts in this topic claiming that toybox is illegal code on the basis that it is being written to contribute to copyright infringement. Raven667 is one of the people making this argument and is using the example of napster as justification.

if you load the full series of comments and search for 'illegal' you will see it being introduced.

About the calculus for the project

raven667 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:33:40 +0000

The argument is that this does not happen in a vacuum, context matters and that this might be argued to be similar to the Napster case. I'm pretty doubtful that either a lawsuit or this interpretation of the situation will ever be realized. In any event I objected to the ridiculous straw man arguments chosen in favor of just arguing on-point since you clearly do understand what was intended.

About the calculus for the project

jake — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:27:28 +0000

> argument that it's illegal for Rob to write toybox under a BSD license

and who on earth has made this argument? not liking him doing so is hardly a claim that it's "illegal" ...

jake

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:03:54 +0000

I think it makes as much sense as the argument that it's illegal for Rob to write toybox under a BSD license because it allows people to avoid complying with the GPLv2 because toybox can be used to replace the Busybox code that Rob also wrote.

I think that both arguments are nonsense, but if you believe in one, the other comes along as baggage.

About the calculus for the project

raven667 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:50:29 +0000

> if you go hunting for it, every opensource project can be framed in a way as to be encouraging people to avoid complying with some commercial license (the free as in beer part of freedom), and this is frequently touted as a significant reason for the open software existing by the project itself (not just a third party talking about the project like in the case of toybox)

This is clearly a nonsense interpretation of what was asserted and I'm disappointed that you'd choose to bring it up this way. The assertion was that because the software only ran on a GPLv2 system and was only useful in this context that building a system using this software for the sole purpose of not complying with the source sharing requirements of the GPLv2 was abetting software piracy even though this software itself is not GPLv2 and does not, itself, have source sharing requirements. This exactly has zero parallels with your examples.

Two different "risks" here

mjg59 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:45:23 +0000

I've personally got the source code for the Nook Color and the Viewsonic Gtablet released, both of which developed vibrant developer communities who, thanks to actually being able to rebase to newer kernels by virtue of having the source, have got newer versions of Android running on the devices than the vendor chose to support.

Availability of kernel source for consumer devices is important, and the uses its been put to are surprising. There are even communities of people who develop replacement firmware for TVs. We've seen what happens without active enforcement of the GPL - most vendors simply never supply their code. Enforcement is a necessary part of giving users the freedoms that the copyright holders intended, and those freedoms make a real difference.

About the calculus for the project

dlang — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:32:36 +0000

be very careful about your argument that a project may be illegal if it exists to let people avoid complying with the license for some other application.

with that argument just about all opensource project are illegal.

after all, what's linux but a project to let people have a unix-like system without complying with the proprietary licenses of the commercial unix systems?

what's openoffice but a project to let people have an alternative to microsoft office without complying with the proprietary licenses that microsoft sells?

if you go hunting for it, every opensource project can be framed in a way as to be encouraging people to avoid complying with some commercial license (the free as in beer part of freedom), and this is frequently touted as a significant reason for the open software existing by the project itself (not just a third party talking about the project like in the case of toybox)

Two different "risks" here

landley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:20:52 +0000

Once again, someone implies that it's somehow immoral for me to write new code obsoleting my old code. Here's some context for that:

I personally started the busybox lawsuits. Erik Andersen had a "hall of shame" page during his 7 years of maintainership but, didn't do anything about it. He had his father send out cease and desist letters, but if they were ignored didn't follow up.

Erik did team up with Bradley Kuhn and Eben Moglen and so on to threaten to sue linksys circa 2003, although I believe _they_ approached _him_. (And possibly Harald Welte as well, I'd have to look it up; it was before I got involved.) That action was carefully targetted and gave us openwrt and derivatives. It also caused Linksys to cease all Linux development and migrate its devices to a proprietary embedded OS for several years, but this was considered worthwhile as part of a larger overall outcome. The "embedded home router niche" hadn't _existed_ before Linksys, and now it was a ground-breakingly cheap deployment platform for open source software.

But guess what? The team of people who were _threatening_ to sue Cisco over the GPL back in 2003? They didn't actually file suit:

http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/14/cz_dl_1014linksys.html

All the work was done _out_ of court, and Cisco cooperated to _keep_ themselves out of court. The threat of a GPL lawsuit was just saber rattling to get Cisco's attention, they negotiated the release of source code _without_ever_filing_suit_.

I decided to experiment with filing actual suits to deal with the "Hall of Shame" I inherited from Erik Andersen when I took over as busybox maintainer. There was an existing, specific backlog of reports, which we expected to yield busybox code we could add to the repository. I asked Erik to cosign because he'd collected the hall of shame and what records there were consisted of his inbox, and the versions in question predated my maintainership and often my participation in busybox development. But Erik spent years not doing it, and setting the wheels in motion for it was one of my first acts as maintainer.

The 2003 Cisco effort, settled out of court without ever filing suit and yielding a mountain of useful code that opened up a new ecological niche to Linux, was nothing _like_ the current round of "sue first, ask questions later, and demand tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a commitment to keep paying protection money on every new product for years afterwards" the SFLC and SFC efforts have devolved into.

I'm now obsoleting the busybox lawsuits not _just_ because they drive companies away from Linux, but because nothing that's happened since 2006 has come even _close_ to openwrt. We got NOTHING OUT OF IT. All the open drivers for chips from nvidia and ati and broadcom and such we've gotten since then happened either because a company _chose_ to be nice (like Intel, hiring the xfree86 guys to push back against microsoft a bit), or because we _reverse_engineered_them_:

http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/announcement.pdf
http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/the-forcedeth-st...
http://r300.sourceforge.net/
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

And so on. Sometimes Linux got support for hardware _FROM_ BSD:

http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/About/History

All this talk about lawsuits being necessary for hardware support does not match reality, and certainly was not the goal of the guy who started the suits (I.E. me).

I can show evidence that the "sue first and ask questions later" approach of stringing together a series of lawsuits to form a self-financing perpetual lawsuit machine that needs to be fed... that does way, way, way more harm than good. Because I started it, I consider stopping it (and thus ending that harm) to be my responsibility.

You're welcome to believe differently, but the facts do not support your position. I have first person experience here: you do not. You have presented no evidence in support of your position. I've asked for people to show me the code that came out of a busybox lawsuit and got merged, nobody has pointed at any. Instead they choose to weigh a purely theoretical benefit vs actual demonstrable harm.

In insulating your beliefs from challenge by facts, you are taking a position based on ideology, which does not match reality, and thus are a religious zealot, not an engineer. As with "eating meat on a friday" or "we only allow these sexual positions", it's easy to insist things are a sin a priori, because religious questions of morality do not actually require an underlying logic. Thus when logic fails, zealots start talking about morality without being able to show evidence of concrete harm to any specific persons.

(I can debate philosophy with you. But if you don't understand why I believe that we should put a teapot in orbit around Mars in honor of Bertrand Russell, you need to do some reading first.)

Rob

P.S. tl;dr - Bwahahahahahaha.

About the calculus for the project

khim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:38:43 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Honestly, if you work in the industry you get to know this stuff...

Sure. These tales are very well-known. But that happened half-century ago. Companies worked diligently to rectify "the problem" all that time. Today the outcome of such lawsuit is quite different to predict.

Oratroll is suing over patents

Nope. Copyrights are very much in dispute, too. And outcome is not yet certain. And I'm sure if Oracle will be repelled this time then it'll cooperate with Disneys and SONYs of the world to change the law to make sure next time they'll win.

In fact the whole SFC "problem" have one trivial and quite logical solution: change the law, reduce copyright power and make what SFC is doing illegal. Sadly Disneys and SONYs of the world reject this solution out of hand because it'll reduce their copyright power, too. Well, as long as that's the case don't expect me to feel any sympathy to their plight. They brought it on themselves.

About the calculus for the project

khim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:21:02 +0000

You are not putting lifebots on a ship. You are adding couple of lifebots to Titanic.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If you don't expect for it to be sunk then why bother with lifebots at all? If you do expect crash and burn scenario then why do you plan to save just a handful of people, not all of them?

About the calculus for the project

landley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:15:33 +0000

> That's different question. I know that the legal system can and does
> forbid people from doing new things that compete with their own previous
> work.

Not in California or Texas it doesn't. ("Right to work" states.) There's rather a lot of case law on this. Silicon Valley was _built_ on the "traitorous eight" from Shockley Semiconductor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

Honestly, if you work in the industry you get to know this stuff...

Rob

(Oratroll is suing over patents, sounds like they're attempting to establish treble damages for wilful violation, ala http://www.ipwatchdog.com/patent/advanced-patent/patent-i... . Which is in fact the reason Linus gives for not reading software patents.)

About the calculus for the project

marcH — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:45:11 +0000

> "s/copyright/patent/"

No.

The copyright system is not perfect and probably too hard but it's fair and basically working. The current patent system is completely broken and totally unfair.

Imagine you write some code, then I copy and massage a few lines of it and bang I get the copyright on the whole thing. This is how the copyright system would look like if it were managed by the USPTO.

About the calculus for the project

landley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:22:20 +0000

By the way, another analogy for all the insane GPL zealots to ponder:

Don't put lifeboats on your cruise ship. Make it unsinkable. By planning for what happens if the boat sinks, you're planning to sink the boat! Shame on you, lifeboats are EVIL!

Rob

About the calculus for the project

landley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:19:53 +0000

"We'd like to get as many patents as possible to protect ourselves from the insane patent system via mutually assured destruction and cross-licensing agreements."

"We'd like to get an alternative to BusyBox to protect ourselves from the insane out of control SFLC/SFC and their demands about third-party binary only kernel modules and vendor toolchains we've never even seen the source code to if we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox but didn't SAY we shipped a vanilla unmodified busybox."

"We'd like to distance ourselves from this legal quagmire rather than try to navigate an endless shifting maze."

That's not _my_ motivation, but I can certainly see spraying for lawyers holding an appeal for people, especially when legal stuff isn't what they _do_. And if it makes 'em more likely to use the code I already _wrote_ and am still adding to (which is technically better than the alternative)? Sure, why not?

Rob

About the calculus for the project

landley — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:11:05 +0000

"s/copyright/patent/"

Let the backpedaling commence.