Amusing article about busybox

Cathey, Jim jcathey at ciena.com
Wed Feb 15 21:02:40 UTC 2012


My (lay) understanding of this is that there are two separate
issues:

1) Company contributes (back) to the project.
2) Company provides sources of whatever they did.

Obviously #1 is preferable, assuming the mods are palatable,
but only #2 is required.  It would take an interested (and
possibly third) party to fold #2's back to #1's.

All this discussion seems to be focused on #1, but Sony
is (?) in the #2 camp.  Unless maybe they're in #3:

3) Company takes sources and never exhibits its modifications.

I thought that only #3's were liable.  #2's are merely annoying.

Free means free.  Free to be a bit of a jerk about it, if that's
what they want to do.  Free to obfuscate all the code, free to
rot13 all the non-keyword vowels in the code, etc.  So long as
they make the results available.

-- Jim



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