The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...

David Daney ddaney at avtrex.com
Wed Jun 28 22:16:24 UTC 2006


Natanael Copa wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 14:29 -0700, David Daney wrote:
> 
>>Rob Landley wrote:
>>
>>>So apparently the FSF's mounted a campaign to get people to switch to BSD:
>>>http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/06/23/1728205&tid=150
>>>
>>>And I just thought I'd ping the list about changing our licensing page to say
>>>that if you have a statement about what exact version of busybox you used,
>>>with what .config file, and that you didn't modify it, then you don't need to
>>>provide the source code.
>>>
>>>Also, if GPLv3 actually _requires_ this (rather than just having a statement
>>>good for 3 years to provide the source code on request, as the GPLv2 has),
>>>that would be (to me) another reason to go for V2 only.
>>>
>>>Does anybody else have any opinions on this issue?
>>
>>You seem to want to make it more difficult to obtain the source code to
>>a given busybox build.  This seems at least mildly contradictory to the
>>reason for the Hall of Shame (http://www.busybox.net/shame.html).
>>
>>Also as a practical manner, you cannot change the license for code you
>>did not write.  So you would have to verify that you were the author of
>>100% of the code to do this.
> 
> 
> No. I think he is afraid of getting in legal problems because FSF makes
> some unreasonalbe demands on the way the sources are available (or
> something like that)

The source is all that can be obtained from bysybox.net so there is no 
problem.  Unless you are distributing binaries with no corresponding 
source you don't have a problem.

Nobody is forcing you to use GPL software. But if you do, you should not 
be surprised if there are negative consequences for not fulfilling your 
obligations under the license.  It is not that different from many other 
things in life in that regard.

David Daney



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