should all BB code be GPL?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Wed Jul 12 16:06:35 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 12 July 2006 9:11 am, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Rob Landley wrote:
>  > > On Monday 10 July 2006 7:20 am, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  > > >   i was just about to write a perl script to go through the source
>  > > > files and replace any GPL-related verbosity with the single-line
>  > > > boilerplate for brevity until i read this in
>  > > > libbb/change_identity.c (sorry about the ugly re-formatting, you
>  > > > can blame pine):
>  > >
>  > > All busybox code _is_ GPL.  If it isn't, we can't ship it in a GPL
>  > > project.
>  >
>  > ok, then, so i can fire up a script and replace all other licensing
>  > crap in BB source files with that one-line boilerplate, then?
>
> i don't understand.  the tinylogin distribution, on which much of
> the busybox login stuff is based, is pretty clear about having a
> BSD-style license, with restrictions that copyright notices
> appear both in the source and the documentation.  we can
> certainly GPL the code, but don't we have to continue honoring
> julianne haugh's "advertising clause"?

I already planned to remove his code in the passwd rewrite I started during 
1.1, but that's because we don't need it.  Passwd and shadow can use common 
code.  (Parsing colon-separated text is not brain surgery.)

> (and, i certainly hope you weren't planning on dropping the Copyright
> notices altogether.)

Of course not.  Copyright notices are different from licensing statements.  A 
license applies to the copyright, it doesn't transfer copyrights.  So who 
owns the copyright is still important information to have a valid license to 
that copyright.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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