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I am sympathetic to people who prefer BSD-style licenses for many reasons, including simplicity, GPLv3 overreach avoidance, and even just declining to give atte
by cliffbean 13y ago
I am sympathetic to people who prefer BSD-style licenses for many reasons, including simplicity, GPLv3 overreach avoidance, and even just declining to give attention to a certain obnoxious man (regardless of what you think of the politics).
However, the individualist in me really likes being able to install my own software on my own hardware. The GPL license, specifically in the areas of a system needed to boot and minimally run, has successfully helped me do this several times in the past, by pushing vendors to deliver source for something that they probably wouldn't have otherwise. It doesn't always work, and it isn't perfect, but it has worked in some cases where seemingly nothing else would have.
As long as this continues to be the case, I won't celebrate the replacement of busybox for licensing purposes.
- adestefan 13y agoIt's pretty strange that the talking notes linked below say that one of the biggest threats to computing is locked down embedded devices. The author's fix is to then implement a replacement that would allow vendors to completely lock down embedded devices.
- eksith 13y agoHuh? The author's fix is to help develop embedded systems by freely distributing an unencumbered tool set with: 1) A smaller attack surface 2) Correctness as a focus with regard to code 3) Conciseness as a focus with regard to tools 4) Improved speed 5) Clear documentation (In TODO) http://www.landley.net/toybox/status.html http://www.landley.net/toybox/status.html http://www.landley.net/toybox/design.html http://www.landley.net/toybox/design.html
- cliffbean 13y agoThose are nice things, but they're also orthogonal to the license choice, which happens to be the detail which made the headline here.
- oakwhiz 13y agoThey're not totally unrelated to the license - all the good code is GPL, and hardware manufacturers sometimes would rather create an insecure software solution than use GPL code. If somewhat good BSD code is available, manufacturers will use it instead, and it will reduce the attack surface of many embedded systems.
- drdaeman 13y agoDo you know any such example of manufacturer reimplementing POSIX userspace from scratch instead of using GNU coreutils or Busybox? Sometimes vendors do not use POSIX userspace altogether by providing big-proprietary-init blob (LG TVs do), but that's irrelevant to Busybox vs Toybox debate.
- synchronise 13y ago'all the good code is GPL' is a pretty unrealistic claim to make.
- oakwhiz 13y agoI agree with this.
- binarycrusader 13y agoall the good code is GPL Yeah, like the Apache web server, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, most of the software released by the Internet Software Consortium, LLVM, SDL, Ogre3D, Xorg, Python, Perl, Django, V8, Lua, Mesa, CEGUI, JQuery, CURL, Sass, Groovy, and LESS among others. You're right, all of the good code is GPL -- oh wait, none of those are. I guess that code's no good.
- pnathan 13y agoI have come to the conclusion that copyleft is the most ethical decision I can make for user of the software I write.