Busybox under closed-source-license avaiable?

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Monday 13 October 2008 08:53:53 am Rob Landley wrote:
> Ok, I'll bite.  Why does the LGPL exist, then?  If a suit comes into court and 
> the open source side says "we have two licenses: LGPL was created after the 
> GPL already existed because people brought up the issue of linking 
> proprietary code against shared libraries like glibc, and companies like 
> trolltech made quite a good living for many years getting people to pay for 
> commercial licenses to link proprietary code against qt; if we'd wanted to 
> LGPL it we had could have, but we didn't"...
> 
> I'm quite happy to ask Denys to _remove_ the shared library capability from 
> busybox if it honestly seemed like having it might undermine our project's 
> ability to enforce the license terms.  (Not that I'm saying it does, and I 
> point out it's his call these days, not mine.  But is that really the road 
> you want to go down?)

Busybox is GPL and not LGPL. There is no (legal) way to use its entire
source without being bound by GPL 2.

Some applets and libbb source files are under GPL 2+, LGPL or
in public domain. If one wants to take _ONLY_ those files
and reimplement all the glue neede to make them work,
one may be able to be bould by these "wider" licenses.

Not much to win there IMO. Public domain part, which allows
the biggest freedom in "closing source", is very small.
The rest still is under "you must open up your source" type
licenses.
--
vda