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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.
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?
No pitching your own crappy stuff here, ok?
On Slashdot?! You must be new here.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
The current suit is brought in the name of Erik Andersen. Erik worked for an embedded Linux company, now defunct, for a few years and was paid to maintain Busybox during that time. During that time the company's name appeared in copyright statements, and mine mostly disappeared.
Bruce Perens.
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.
Yes, there's that. He also worked on the program after he was no longer employed by that company. I am not disputing that he has significant copyright interest in the program as it exists today.
Bruce Perens.
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?
Anybody who has contributed to a piece of GPL software has standing to bring lawsuits against people who violate the GPL. Who has contributed the "majority" of the code is immaterial. I'm sorry this is inconvenient for Bruce Perens, but it can't reasonably work any different.
I don't think Bruce wants to stop the lawsuit, he justs wants to get a piece of the pie.
Doesn't sound like that to me.
I'm not really sure what he hopes to gain unless he wants a piece of any monetary damages awarded ... ?
How about clarification, like he says in his letter:
Unfortunately, all of this is confusing my strategic consulting customers. Thus, I will offer them a waiver of my interest where appropriate.
What this says to me is that he has clients who got spooked by the suit, and he's publically stating that he's not a party to it, and won't sue them... which is pretty much the opposite of "wanting a piece of the pie."
I am the one that handed BusyBox over to Anderson after maintaining it for 2 years.
I believe I worked with Busybox longer then Bruce did and during my time I reorganized the code, but still consider Bruce the primary root Copyright holder and license grantor. 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.
Even if every line of code Bruce or myself wrote were replaced, it was done so on his and subsequently my license terms which are the GPL. My privileges and Anderson's privileges (if any ?) to alter and redistribute Bruce's work are based on those license terms derived from Bruce's initial publication and you can not simply 'code them away' unless you start from scratch.
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?
This is presently being tried in another case, Jacobsen v. Katzer. It looks as if there will be significant damages that the Open Source developer can collect. The judge seems to think so in that he granted a motion for summary judgement (after at first rejecting it).
Bruce Perens.
You might find Jacobsen v. Katzer educational. Jacobsen was using the Artistic License 1.0, and this did not protect him from Katzer.
Bruce Perens.
You don't believe I've never communicated with these folks, do you? I did. And learned very quickly that it was the wrong approach where Mr. Landley was involved.
Bruce Perens.
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.
In my mind, Eric was the inventor. I paid him in 2000 to add some uClinux / Busybox code to the Coldfire project for my Blabbermouth product at airlib.com.
I would probe the uClinux guys, Lineo, Greg Ungerer, Phil Wilshire...
Sometimes its the guy who "ran with it" who assumes ownership....
After the fact, that is tough to swallow. And the Busybox name and concept is genius whoever did it.
Merry Christmas
Then isn't that enough to enforce it? Where does your copyright come into picture? He's enforcing his copyright, not yours.
In the U.S. the license is the choice of the copyright holder. There are many on Linux. And thus to change the license on Linux, you have to ask all of those copyright holders, as best as you are able to reach them, including through public notices. Then, you have to remove the work of those who object. And then you can relicense.
This is so painful that there would have to be a very good reason. Like GPL2 becoming seriously less enforcible.
Bruce Perens.
I'm surprised that someone hasn't written something like BusyBox starting from FreeBSD's utilities.
They have. Go to a FreeBSD console and run ls -i /rescue. There are 133 binaries in that directory on my desktop, each being a hardlink to the same statically linked file, with behavior depending on the value of argv[0] when the program is run. The idea is to include all the programs you might need to repair a FreeBSD system in single-user without having even /usr mounted. See the man page for crunchgen(1) for more details.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?