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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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The version 0.60.3 of Busybox upon which Mr. Andersen claims copyright registration in the lawsuits is to a great extent my own work and that of other developers. I am not party to the registration. It is not at all clear that Mr. Andersen holds a majority interest in that work.
Perhaps it is high time you looked into the allegations that "every line of code you wrote for Busybox is gone?" It is still GPLed, afterall. Wouldn't your old code diffed against the new code reveal the truth in that statement and set things straight in whose interest the SFLC should be representing?
If you can point me to a version/tag/branch/code repository where you assert your dominance in authorship, I would be more than happy to spend an hour when I get home tonight generating some stats against the current code (assuming that code hasn't been drastically moved around/repackaged/renamed). Even so, it would fairly trivial to script an expensive file-by-file comparison and return a set of the most likely matches based on percentage similarities to establish what work of yours may remain. Might even be a better tool out there than what I know of.
My work here is dung.
The final part of his statement raises an interesting issue. In the realm of OSS, contributions from multiple developers are encouraged. But what happens if those developers then get into a geek catfight later? This is all well and good if the work is true open source (everyone can just fork off an do whatever they want). But when you get into lawsuits over the more restrictive GPL license violations, that raises the issue of who gets to sue and who gets the proceeds from the suit (after all, what's to stop someone from just forking the code and taking out other developers' names from the copyright notice in the software, then suing without the other guys).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sorry "editors" but many of us have no clue what this article is about based on the two sentence summary about a guy and company I have never heard of. Perhaps a little more explanation would help?
I think the issue is whether false claims have been made about Person A in the process of Person B suing Company C. Bruce's statement kind of implies that.
Also, Bruce's statement implies that SFLC is using rather overzealous "sue without negotiation beforehand" techniques that are damaging to the business of some of the other Busybox developers, including himself. Whether he has a legal leg to stand on is unknown, either way it's kind of a "dick move" on the part of those involved in the lawsuit.
It's just like the patent system - there are companies that are typically very reasonable in terms of patent license negotiations and consider a lawsuit to be an absolute last resort (I knew someone who worked for Lucent's IP licensing organization - lawsuits were an asbolute last resort for them.), while other companies prefer to patent troll and immediately open up with a lawsuit.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It seems from your post that:
1) You seem upset that SFLC isn't representing *your* interests in the matter, but they are representing others.
2) You are unhappy that someone registered a copyright without including you on it.
3) You seem to imply that you'd be willing to waive your rights in the matter, or give your blessing to distribution without source.
1 is not relevant
2 would suggest you should go after the people who registered it - unless my interpretation of 3 is correct.
3 If true, why would you say that?
The only point I can see to your rant is to draw attention to yourself and your consulting business trying to raise doubts about a bunch of things.
What exactly is your point here?
If I understand this correctly, all one needs to do is get one change into the source and they have standing to bring a lawsuit against any company not in compliance. From what I read in Wikipedia, these guys have already received undisclosed amounts in previous settlements. That could get interesting - some minor developer suing and getting paid for the work a majority of others have performed. What standing do the other developers have for getting a cut of any settlement?
BSD is fine for a company like Google who makes so much money on the platform that the code runs on (both directly, and indirectly by further cementing the Google "brand") that it matters little to them that they give the source code away.
I can assure you that if you are an individual developer, your interests will be MUCH better served by releasing your code under GPL (NOT LGPL). If you release under BSD, you will get nothing of value back from anybody (except possibly some changes released back to you if whoever wrote them "feels like it"). If you release under GPL (NOT LGPL) you will get bug fixes and improvements because anyone who makes bug fixes or improvements, and intends to distribute them, must give them back to you. And you will also get money if your code is worthwhile enough, from companies who want to use your code to save them their own development time and money, and who will be happy to accept the code under a proprietary license from you in return for money.
I played around and made a software library with a fairly specific purpose that I released under GPL. I didn't intend to make money off of it; it was to be part of a larger project that I haven't (yet) completed (and is currently on hold as I've lost interest, but I intend to get back to it ... eventually). I ended up making $6,000 so far from companies who wanted to use the code in their own products rather than re-developing it in-house. It's not a huge sum, but it sure is nice to get money instead of getting nothing, which is what I would have gotten if I had released under BSD.
Is it against the "sprit" of GPL to issue a separate closed source license for the library for money? I don't think so. Only the author of the software in question has any say whatsoever over what is right and what is wrong with respect licensing that software; no one else's opinion is even remotely relevent. And GPL is a great tool if you want to give your code away for others to use but want to be rewarded if anyone finds it useful.
The BSD license is a great license if you are a company like Google for whom the value of the platform is worth more than the value of the code used to make it. But if you are an individual developer, it's no different really than releasing to the public domain, for which you should expect to get, and will get, nothing in return for your efforts.
I'll have to agree with larry here. This touches an area that is nuanced, to say the least, but replacing the code needs to be an option in some cases. As an example, I worked on an OSS project several years back. For perfectly valid reasons, the current project maintainer wanted to change the license. He attempted to contact all the authors for their permission to relicense the code under the new license. If he got no response, or the original author said "no", then his only option was to replace the code with code he had written himself. This seems a perfectly valid approach to me, considering the old code is still available from the same source. I happened to miss noticing his request until it was too late (infrequently checked mail account), so was happy he could replace the code and move on.
I suppose if one wanted to adopt a strict interpretation of "derivative", then replacing code within an existing framework might be considered in violation of the license, but people really need to think before playing this card. It makes situations like "if you show us patented code in our application, we'll replace it" much more difficult to reconcile easily, especially if the code violating the patent was part of the original application code. Then the replacement code is 'derivative' and still subject to the original claims.
That's a mighty big can of worms you could be opening, Diesel Dave. Maybe even Pandora's box.
That's not strictly true. If I started out with a movie that was original "Star Wars", and I slowly but surely removed every frame of that film, and then saved the film. It would not be considered a derived work of Star Wars. No harm no foul. If I started out with the Linux Kernel, and I released version 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, up to 0.9, and finally released Kirbix at 1.0 and claimed I owned the copyright. I would be obligated to give the source code out for versions 0.1 and 0.9 (assuming I distributed them to anyone), but at 1.0, I'd be well within my rights to re-license the software. Bruce is claiming "compiliation copyright", which I'm unfamiliar with the basics of that.
I don't understand what legal principle is being applied to claim some piece of the copyright if I had replaced all of the pieces and parts. The mostly commonly known situation like this is the old BSD UNIX distribution. Eventually it was determined that UC had sole rights to all of their copy of UNIX, because they had slowly but surely replaced all of the pieces of AT&T's UNIX. I thought 4.4BSD Lite was essentially BSD UNIX minus the 7-10 files that AT&T still owned. Eventually those last bits were re-written and 386BSD and it's decendents (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD) were spawned in the late '80s (looks like I might have the timeline wrong, but the salient points at the end of the Wikipedia story linked above shows the thrust of this is correct). In my mind that sets a much stronger precedent then what I have seen of Bruce's claims, assuming that "I've re-written every line" claim is true. However, I believe Bruce is probably right, that it hasn't all been re-written. Just a hunch. Re-writing "everything" is pretty darn difficult.
Kirby
Then isn't that enough to enforce it? Where does your copyright come into picture? He's enforcing his copyright, not yours.
I'd like to correct a few things in that statement.
First of all, Perens was involved in the early wiki venture, but was also at the same time a big advocate of open source in general. In particular he has a long running feud with RMS regarding credit for who wrote the original GPL.
Second, Perens is not the cousin, but the brother-in-law of Wales.
The name Busybox should make it obvious that it is a porn related collection of apps. Perens did work quite a bit in the 1-900 phone call porn business before the internet.
Perens has a BA in library science from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. The library school later became a "school of information science", giving Perens the idea that he should learns something about IT. After a series of courses at the University of Phonix in microsoft office, he was able to leave his 1-900 job to join Wales.
I'm surprised that someone hasn't written something like BusyBox starting from FreeBSD's utilities. Busybox is just "cat", "echo", "grep", etc. all in one executable with some common code merged. It's not like it's a significant original work. FreeBSD has all those components with the BSD license.
Microsoft will love this!
This thread gives them a lot of evidence about why GPL should never be used.