Bruce Perens wrote:
> who was for a time a Busybox developer and has been the main plaintiff
> represented by the Conservancy.
Erik is indeed a member of Conservancy's GPL enforcement coalition of
copyright holders. But, I think you misspoke there slightly, Bruce: Erik and
Conservancy were co-Plaintiffs in our GPL enforcement lawsuit together. Dan
Ravicher represented us as legal counsel in the proceedings.
Before that, Erik did enforcement on his own with his own lawyers, and he also
coordinated with FSF circa 2003 (during my time as FSF's Executive Director)
on the (in)famous Linksys WRT54G violation.
So, it comes down to what you mean by "represents". Many people use that
word primarily to mean "as legal counsel". Conservancy, in this case,
coordinates individual Free Software copyright holders to help them
enforce the GPL, and (when needed) Conservancy helps find lawyers to
represent them, and our org. (Conservancy also holds some copyrights that
developers have assigned to us voluntarily, too.) Conservancy has various
different legal counsel and law firms who have helped us over the years in
doing (initially) BusyBox and (now) Linux, BusyBox, Samba, and et al
enforcement.
(I always have to remind everyone that IANAL... people always seem to think I
am. I assume you have the same problem, Bruce. I, like Bruce, am a
non-lawyer who has spent far too much time around lawyers. :)
> As it happens, some of the surveilance tools out there are made by Erik
> Andersen, ... As far as I am aware, the surveilance tools use Busybox.
I don't believe what Erik's company develops would correctly be classified as
"surveillance tools". I haven't received distribution myself of Erik's
product, but he described it to me on the phone once, and it sounds more like
a user-guided forensic analysis tool (e.g., to extract data of a hard drive
seized during a criminal case and make sure that the disk isn't
corrupted/tampered with in the process of extracting the data.)
Assuming the warrants were granted legitimately, and truly met the USA
Constitutional requirements for such [0], I don't have any objection to such
a tool. I want our government to enforce, say, child pornography laws and be
able to collect the evidence from the suspect's computers. I'm, in fact,
really glad GPL'd software that I've contributed to can help in such an
endeavor!
Erik did tell me the software uses BusyBox and Erik assured me that there
is a clear offer for source right on the bootable media of the product. :) I
am not in possession of that offer for source though. I suppose you could
email Erik and ask for it, but I suspect that the .config files for BusyBox
and buildroot are the only additional CCS that isn't already upstreamed. :)
But, I nevertheless don't think Erik's is the software in question that
started this discussion.
-- bkuhn
[0] Off topic, but last year I served jury duty on a USA federal grand jury.
After the experience, I am very disturbed that USA's grand jury process
does not function justly. I worked really hard to fix that, but there is
very little one juror can do, especially on grand juries which are
majority vote rather than unanimous. :( ... But, this footnote is clearly
off-topic for this list... other than to say we probably can't find
the cause of problems in the USA justice system via a GPL violation. :)
