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Linus Speaks His Mind on GPL Enforcement

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-usually-sugarcoated dept.

JaKe writes:

In the time leading up to the next Kernel Summit topics are presented and discussed beforehand on the Ksummit-discuss mailing list. There [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues was introduced. Even though Linus is not subscribed to this list he speaks his mind, bluntly. A good read.

I'm not aware of anybody but the lawyers and crazy people that were happy about how the BusyBox situation ended up. Please pipe up if you actually know differently. All it resulted in was a huge amount of bickering, and both individual and commercial developers and users fleeing in droves. Botht he original maintainer and the maintainer that started the lawsuits ended up publicly saying it was a disaster.

So I think the whole GPL enforcement issue is absolutely something that should be discussed, but it should be discussed with the working title.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:09AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 06 2016, @01:09AM (#397936) Journal
    I'm not hearing much of a criticism. There could be a lot of potential GPL violations which doesn't mean that there are, or that these violations have to be dealt with via a lawsuit. And in the BusyBox case, there's a remarkable lack of support for the SFC's actions from the developers to the point that various developers have proposed (or more accurately restarted) a replacement project [lwn.net] for BusyBox under a more lenient license.

    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.

  • (Score: 1) by bug1 on Thursday September 08 2016, @12:17PM

    by bug1 (5243) on Thursday September 08 2016, @12:17PM (#399125)

    There was enforcement work being done for busybox before that, and even before SFC existed.

    There is one developer who is unhappy with SFC, and he is unhappy with FSF and pretty much anything related to it.

    People see what they want to see.