Amusing article about busybox

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 08:05:26PM +1000, Mark Constable wrote:
> On 11/02/12 16:41, Rogelio Serrano wrote:
> > we might as well just rewrite linux under a more permissive license...
> 
> Feel free, have fun. Not that anyone cares but I wouldn't be using it.
> 
> I am guessing but I suspect a lot of the intellectual semantics of how
> busybox works will be transferred to toybox without attribution. That

This is actually completely false and shows that you haven't even
bothered to read the most basic description of Toybox's goals and
design principles. In many ways, Busybox has a lot more in common with
coreutils, util-linux, BSD, etc. code than with Toybox, because the
latter is a clean implementation largely from scratch written largely
from the standards rather than from copying implementation behavior.

> is all fine and legal but I would be curious to know if a close parallel
> project like toybox has in any way contributed *anything* back to the
> busybox project even though they are "borrowing" the core concept?

The "core concept" (a multi-function binary) is neither an original
concept nor a valuable one. The value of Busybox is not any abstract
concepts but simply the facts that it works, it's relatively complete,
and it's very small.

> Guessing again, I suspect not and if so then it nicely illustrates why
> the the GPL is important and should be enforced where ever possible, to
> help prevent one way dilution of intellectual concepts, let alone code.

I'm not quite sure what "prevent one way dilution of intellectual
concepts" means, but it sounds very scary and antithetical to the
goals of even the most zealous free software advocates...

Rich