Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by dskoll

January 31, 2012

I don't really understand Garrett's complaint about this project. If someone wishes to write a Busybox replacement from scratch under a different license, that's his or her right. It sucks if it makes GPL enforcement harder, but that's life.

15:23 UTC

by mjg59

January 31, 2012

If you engage in a legitimate act in order to make it easier to engage in an illegitimate act, that's usually socially frowned upon. The reason to replace Busybox isn't because they don't want to hand over the source to Busybox - it's because Busybox is being used as a proxy to obtain the source code for more interesting GPLed works. People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license.

15:26 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by dwmw2

January 31, 2012

Under British copyright law, at least until Temple Island vs. New English Teas [ http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWPCC/2012/1.html ] gets overturned by someone with half a brain, any reimplementation of Busybox would probably still be considered to be an infringement of the original copyright of Busybox ☺

15:54 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by tbird20d

January 31, 2012

People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license.

This is conjecture on your part, and I can say with 100% certainty that it is untrue. I am the Sony engineer you referenced in your article, and this is not my intent.

18:09 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by mjg59

January 31, 2012

How many vendors are you aware of who have been sued for Busybox infringement while compliant with all the other GPLed code they were shipping?

18:12 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by dskoll

January 31, 2012

People want a Busybox replacement in order to make it easier to infringe the kernel's license.

That's your supposition, not a fact. Even if it is the case that people are replacing Busybox to avoid copyright holders who vigorously go after GPL violations, the solution isn't to decry the replacement of Busybox. The solution is to lobby other copyright holders to defend their copyrights more vigorously or to assign them to the Software Freedom Conservancy.

18:54 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by mjg59

January 31, 2012

I'm not decrying the replacement of Busybox. I'm decrying the cynical attitude of the corporations backing it.

18:55 UTC (Tue)

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by tbird20d

January 31, 2012

I have no idea. What's that got to do with my intent?

19:16 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

As the ex-maintainer of busybox who STARTED those lawsuits in the first place and now HUGELY REGRETS ever having done so, I think I'm entitled to stop the lawsuits in whatever way I see fit.

They never resulted ina single line of code added to the busybox repository. They HAVE resulted in more than one company exiting Linux development entirely and switching to non-Linux operating systems for their embedded products, and they're a big part of the reason behind Android's "No GPL in userspace" policy. (Which is Google, not Sony.)

Toybox is my project. I've been doing it since 2006 because I believe I can write a better project than busybox from an engineering perspective. I mothballed it because BusyBox had a 10 year headstart so I didn't think it mattered how much BETTER it was, nobody would use it. Tim pointed out I was wrong about that, I _agreed_ with him once I thought about it, so I've started it up again.

Rob

19:22 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by mjg59

January 31, 2012

Replacing Busybox with a BSD version only helps if Busybox is the only infringing component. So if you're not trying to protect people who have infringing non-Busybox components, the number of people who are being sued purely for Busybox violations is very relevant.

19:29 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

Why do you insist that I'm not behind my own project? Did it escape you that not only am I mentioned by NAME on the wiki page you linked to, but the other wiki page it links to http://www.elinux.org/Busybox_replacement is a page I put all the actual _content_ on?

The last time Sony gave me any money was travel expenses for speaking at CELF two years ago. I've never received a dime from ANYBODY for doing toybox.

Sony was considering sponsoring the work because they'd like to use the result and for-profit corporations only understand things they're either paying for or being paid for, but whether that would be paying _me_ for my weekends or paying another developer to contribute code to me... who knows? Unlikely to happen now, since you've made it a political hot potato. (Once again, an FSF zealot reduces the amount of code written for Linux with a license tantrum. Driving developers away since 1983!)

But I've been doing Toybox since 2006 for free, and I've been doing it as BSD-licensed project since November for free, and I intend to keep doing it. For reasons that I've blogged about rather a lot, on and off for YEARS:

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#12-12-2008
http://landley.net/notes-2009.html#15-12-2009
http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#16-12-2011

And I was doing it because my infrastructure is BETTER:

http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-March/071783.html

And I mothballed and unmothballed it for years because it was fun to work on but I didn't think it could displace an existing project with a 10 year headstart no matter how much better it was:

http://landley.net/notes-2010.html#05-01-2010

Tim pointed out there was a demand for a BSD-licensed version. My decision to relicense toybox was back in November:

http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011

Since then I've written a number of commands, entirely hobbyist development:

http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2012-January/000026.html

Sigh. I have to go do day job things now, but I'll try to write up a comprehensive blog entry on on this tonight. In the meantime, I've commented rather a lot on the original blog, pointing out that Garrett's welcome to do his own darn license enforcement if he wants to, and if he hasn't written any code anybody actually _uses_ that's NOT MY PROBLEM.

19:38 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

You can sue over the other stuff based on their copyright holders.

Stop trying to leverage MY code to promote YOUR political agenda. Write your own darn code.

(And complaining about ME writing NEW code because obsoleting my own previous work hurts YOUR agenda is just _sad_.)

19:41 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

I still retain my original copyrights to all the code I contributed to busybox. The SFLC's right to represent those copyrights was terminated in 2008. They still have Erik Andersen and Denys Vlasenko on board, but I have standards documents and man pages to point to as implementing documented standards, and all my code's public if you'd like to compare for similarity.

Oh, and Bruce Fscking Perens got the idea of a swiss-army-knife executable from gzip, it was not original with him:

http://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt

I started toybox in 2006 in part because Bruce's GPLv3 trolling made busybox unpleasant to even _look_ at for me (http://lwn.net/Articles/202106/), but I still wanted to work on that _kind_ of thing because I felt I could do a BETTER JOB, from an engineering standpoint. Which means a radically different implementation.

I solved the _technical_ challenges, but then had to figure out whether or not to continue the project in context with busybox. I explicitly mentioned "undermining my hand-picked successor" on busybox as a reason NOT to continue:

http://landley.net/notes-2008.html#30-06-2008

And didn't... until the market vacuum on android was pointed out to me by Tim. Toybox was all my code, which I could BSD license if I wanted to, and I thought it over fairly extensively before doing so:

http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#13-11-2011

Years ago I wouldn't have considered doing so, but now?

http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#16-12-2011

Bring it.

19:59 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by BrucePerens

January 31, 2012

Hm, it seems to me that you've leveraged my code for just such purposes.

20:08 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

Nope, I proved that you didn't have any code left in the project, remember?

http://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt

If I'd found any code in the project that was under your copyright, which you objected to shipping GPLv2 only, I would have removed it. That's why I did the search, to remove such code and thus satisfy your objections: there wasn't any.

You also didn't come up with the idea of a "swiss army knife" executable, the first busybox contained gzip/gunzip which already did that upstream (and Red Hat's nash did it too). You never posted on the busybox list once in the 10 years between when Erik Andersen created it and when you started trolling about GPLv3. As far as I can tell, you haven't written any actual code _anywhere_ in 15 years.

Go away, you're not relevant.

20:15 UTC (Tue)

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by corbet

January 31, 2012

There is a lot of interesting discussion happening in the comments to this article. I would sure hate to see it get overrun by a Bruce-vs-Rob name-calling session. Your disagreements in this area are well understood, well documented, have not changed in years, and are not really relevant to the subject at hand. Could I ask, please, that they not be rehashed now?

Thanks.

20:18 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by BrucePerens

January 31, 2012

Oh, and Bruce Fscking Perens got the idea of a swiss-army-knife executable from gzip, it was not original with him:

You've repeated this one for years, and it's wrong, wrong, wrong. I did not get the idea of linking all of the names to one executable from gzip, and I never claimed that particular element of busybox as an invention.

I first worked on Unix at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory, the predecessor of Pixar, in 1981. At the time we had Version 6 Unix on PDP-11 and we were just getting the first VAX to be released from DEC. The device of linking multiple names to one executable was present in the command line tool set of Version 6 Unix, and you can probably go to a V6 source archive and find it there today. It was not invented as part of gzip.

20:20 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by landley

January 31, 2012

I didn't say it was invented as part of busybox, I was pointing out an instance of it predating busybox in one of the components of the original busybox. I.E. here's proof it WASN'T an original invention in busybox.

20:25 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by BrucePerens

January 31, 2012

As it happens, multiple lawyers I've discussed this with say he's wrong about my work having been removed from the program. But we can't stop him from perpetuating this.

20:32 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by BrucePerens

January 31, 2012

This is the straw man fallacy. I never claimed to invent it, you argue that I didn't invent it.

What I did was make a tiny replacement of the entire Unix command line toolkit necessary for a limited purpose that ran like the command line programs it replaced, not like the "stand-alone shell" programs that people were making around then. I made the first, what follows are destined to be clones and copies.

20:41 UTC

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by job

January 31, 2012

The point argued in the article is not regarding code contributed to Busybox, of which there may indeed be none as you point out. But there has been a lot of contributed code elsewhere, mainly a lot of hardware support, that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. I fail to see how this isn't a good thing. A vendor who leaves Linux development because of copyleft wouldn't have contributed anyway.

21:38 UTC (Tue)

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

by BrucePerens

January 31, 2012

It's necessary to balance having complying vendors who contribute code against having all possible vendors and a lot of them non-compliant and not contributing anything. This means that you will lose a company like Cisco, who uses you for an excuse to do something they wanted to do anyway. Surely Cisco has enough lawyers and engineers to do compliance correctly if they want to.

21:59 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by landley

January 31, 2012

I'll stop replying to him, but it _is_ relevant that:

A) I stopped working on busybox in the first place because he made doing so intolerable.

B) I started Toybox in part to have a clean untainted environment without any possibility of his claim over it.

C) I never would have considered doing a BSD licensed project if GPLv2 hadn't been undermined by people who made GPLv3 intolerable. (I didn't leave the GPL, it left me.)

I'm working now to fill a market vacuum (mainframe -> minicomputer -> microcomputer -> smartphone, an "android self-hosting project" if you will), but I'm in a _position_ to do so because I was driven out of my old comfort zone by a variant of SCO's old "communicable taint" IP claims making my old project Unclean. What follows is me making the best of the hand I was dealt.

Rob

23:05 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by Trelane

February 1, 2012

> I never would have considered doing a BSD licensed project if GPLv2 hadn't been undermined by people who made GPLv3 intolerable. (I didn't leave the GPL, it left me.)

I'm curious what, in particular, of the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 you object to, in contrast to {L,}GPLv2.

Thanks!

0:22 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by BrucePerens

February 1, 2012

If you are OK with corporations doing whatever they want with your code and never returning anything, you will prefer BSD over GPL.

If you think Tivo-ization is OK, you will prefer GPL2 to GPL3.

If you think running Free Software inside of Google and never providing the source code (because it's never distributed) is OK, you will prefer the GPL class of licenses over the Affero GPL class.

Making free software, for me, was about empowering people, not giving welfare to the world's richest corporations. So, these days I put Affero GPL3 on my software, and I offer a commercial license for $$$ to folks who don't like that.

Some would have you believe that I am crazy or evil or trying to compel people to do something against their will, or some religious zealot.

But I see this as economics rather than politics or religion. I have chosen the economic structure that helps people who want to share most effectively, and lets people who don't want to share pay for the privilege and help to develop more software that is shared.

1:38 UTC (Wed)

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by Trelane

February 1, 2012

Thank you for your input.

I'd also be quite interested in finding out what this alleged veto mentioned below thing was all about. :) Preferably with links to the supporting evidence.

1:42 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by BrucePerens

February 1, 2012

The interesting thing is that after writing that stuff, Best Buy settled with SFC. They accepted those terms they're complaining about.

The whole "veto" thing (that's Best Buy's language, not SFC's) is that if you settle with SFC, they want you to provide them with copies of new products that contain Free Software before you release them, for a period of three years after you settle. You pay them about $5000 per product to audit the product (which is really cheap). If they say it's infringing, you have to fix the infringement before you release the product. If you and SFC can't agree, you can fall back on the court. In practice, the court hasn't been needed, but I have had to help out a customer when SFC was too slow to respond.

2:01 UTC

Can we stop this sub-thread?

by Trelane

February 1, 2012

Interesting; thanks for the info. Where's the settlement? If it's settled, I'd assume it's sealed, so why is the PDF of the defendant's side available?

Regarding the "veto" thing (yes, their wording): What is common for proprietary settlements, generally speaking? (Definitely open question to all)

2:07 UTC

Sealed

by BrucePerens

February 1, 2012

If it's settled, I'd assume it's sealed, so why is the PDF of the defendant's side available?

The parties and the court had not agreed to close the case to public view at that time. They agreed to seal as part of the settlement.

What is common for proprietary settlements, generally speaking?

Very large damage payments.

2:22 UTC (Wed)