Amusing article about busybox

Rich Felker dalias at aerifal.cx
Sun Feb 12 20:42:11 UTC 2012


On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 01:26:23AM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 1:14 AM, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> > In my book the wishes of the copyright holders are virtually
> > worthless. It's the rights of users that matter. GPL exists to protect
> > the rights of people who receive software, not the rights of people
> > who write it. If you write GPL software with the intention of not
> > enforcing the GPL and discouraging others from enforcing it, and then
> > use the fact that it's "GPL" to allow yourself to incorporate
> > thousands of contributions and code snippets adopted from other GPL
> > projects, you're barely one notch above infringers on the moral
> > scale..
> 
> Yes, that is the all so usual free software vs. open source divide in
> approaches.
> 
> It doesn't matter why the GPL exists, it only matters why the
> copyright holders chose it. If they realize the GPL is doing a
> disservice to them, they might choose something else.

You mean they might decide to start over and write something new from
scratch without all the GPL-only contributions they've accumulated.
Good luck to them...

> > No, Toybox being open source has nothing to do with Sony. It was open
> > source many years before Sony was involved.
> 
> OK. I would say then we would have to wait and see if Sony
> contributes, but really, the complexities of big companies make it so
> sometimes by their own policy they cannot contribute directly, so they
> create a separate entity which can contribute, and they do so under a
> name that is not sony.com. Crazy, but I've seen it happen _exactly_
> like that.

Why should I care if they contribute? The quality of code that comes
out of corporate environments is (on average) so abysmal that it's
probably part of the reason things like Android remain forks rather
than getting integrated upstream. I really don't want Sony's or even
Google's code in itself. I want users to have access to their
platforms as a foundation for disencumbering their devices.

Rich


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