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Busybox Developer Responds To Andersen-SFLC Lawsuits
Bruce Perens writes "I'm the creator of the Busybox program. I have released a statement on the past and current Busybox lawsuits, which do not represent my interest."
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If Messrs Andersen and Landley own copyrights to any part of the Busybox program, they can sue for infringement of the copyright on their bit of the code, even if the majority of it was written by you.
In any case, I believe it contains a Linux kernel, or at least parts of it, written by Linus Torvalds and his friends, and presumably at least parts of the gnu tools that Busybox provides stripped down versions of. This of course is perfectly permissible, and the whole point of the GPL and other free and open source software licences is to allow and encourage this sort of thing to happen. All these developers have a copyright interest in the Busybox program, and could sue if they wanted to.
In the U.S. any of the copyright holders can sue independently. Elsewhere, that might not be true. And they each have the right to decide to look for damages, or not. Mostly, Free Software developers forgive past infringement in exchange for current compliance and do not ask for damages. However, if a company is a long-term non-responder, they will look for compensation for their time.
Bruce Perens.
The vendor has to comply with all of the license terms. Including providing the license statement, etc. We don't want to give them another decision to make by making them check if they've made any changes, and then do so again every time they distribute a new version, we just want them to provide the source as that ends up being easiest.
If they have made no modification, we will be able to see that from the source that they provide. But they often make modifications, if only to fix a bug, to port the software, or to add a feature. If they have any sense they don't link their big proprietary feature into the Busybox executable. But even if they did, they could remove it as part of coming into compliance.
Bruce Perens.
Joe the burger-flipper buys a car with Linux embedded in the dashboard computer. He then sells it to Jim. Jim asks Joe for source-code. Joe doesn't know what source-code is.
So, there are some cases where it doesn't make sense to ask the "distributor". The manufacturer would know what to do, and the manufacturer has created the derivative work involved. In general, the manufacturer would take care of this obligation for Joe.
Bruce Perens.
Anderson is claiming complete Copyright and that is simply an impossibility. As far as I am concerned, this claim is a GPL violation in and of itself.
This is exactly the most disturbing issue to me here. Being able to re-write GPL code and then claim sole copyright on that new code would completely invalidate the entire concept of derivative work on which the GPL and every other software license is based.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
One responds to publicity with publicity. SFLC made a point of publicizing the suit.
Bruce Perens.