On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 13:11 -0200, Matheus Izvekov wrote:
[....]
> I think there are two main points about this:
> The first is that I agree with Tim that suspending the license is a
> big issue for any company wishing to ship busybox,
> much more so if all of their other unrelated products are held
> hostage. Any litigation regarding busybox should remain
That's a question of legal systems, laws and how that works in general -
and it works in pretty all areas of life that way BTW.
And if it is truly such "a big issue" for them, why they are risking it
in the first place?
> confined to the offending product and the enforcement of busybox
> itself only. Also, the companies by themselves taking
I don't see any difference to any proprietary license.
> the steps to amend and make the product compliant should be sufficient
> to have the license reinstated and the legal
> matter dropped.
> Second point is that any decision regarding whether to sue or not
> should take into consideration what we want in return,
> and also the overall costs involved.
> A small list of things we (?) may want in return, in order of importance:
> 1) Code
> Does the product in question ship a patched busybox at all? Is
> there any reason to believe that?
> If not, then no reason to ask them to release it anyway just
> for self-gratification.
Well, where is the problem with releasing it if it's unchanged?
> Is the modification big enough to warrant all the costs and
> manpower wasted in the process?
In the GPL world, it's for the reader/consumer to decide that - not the
one with obligation to republish it.
And the effort is - when done seriously - pretty negligible if you
automate it for 95% of the work. You just have to keep track which
original sources you import and pull all changes out from $SCM for each
release and tar.gz it. Voila. BTDT ....
> If Denys or anyone else could reimplement it in a few hours,
> then it's hardly worth all the fuss.
I fail to find any of this in any GPL text. Care to explain where you
got that "effort is relevant" from?
And again, it's the outside to decide that (and different people may
come to a different decision).
> Do we even care about the modifications at all?
> The changes could be one big ugly hack, out of the scope, and
> all other reasons
> why patches get rejected here in this mailing list.
And the patches/changes could be committed right away - unless you
assume that all commercial-proprietary changes are "one big ugly hack".
And again, it's the outside to decide that (and different people may
come to a different decision).
[...]
> Now, to see in which position this would put busybox, my question is,
[ deleted ]
You start at the completely wrong side: The question is *why* all these
large companies with all these very professional employees manage to
handle lots of different proprietary licenses with lots of other
companies without getting sued and fail to get it correct with the GPL
right from the start?
Bernd
--
Bernd Petrovitsch Email : be...@petrovitsch.priv.at
LUGA : http://www.luga.at
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