Matheus Izvekov wrote at 10:11 (EST) on Monday: > 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 > confined to the offending product and the enforcement of busybox > itself only. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, 99.999% of enforcement actions never go to litigation, and Conservancy always allows and even encourages the company to continue distributing the products out of compliance, as long as the company is actively working to come into compliance in a verifiable way. The goal is to convince the company to be a compliant redistributor of GPL'd software, and demanding a stop of shipment would not help toward that goal. > A small list of things we (?) may want in return, in order of > importance: 1) Code One of the important things to note is that, while GPL enforcement is typically done *by* the upstream copyright holders, it is done *on behalf* of the users who got the product with BusyBox in it. Most of our violation reports come from frustrated users who found BusyBox in a product that they bought. In the embedded market, the biggest problem is that the distributions of BusyBox fail to include the "scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable", which the GPLv2 requires. As such, users who wish to take a new upstream version of BusyBox and install it on their device are left without any hope of doing so. Most embedded-market GPL enforcement centers around remedying this. Indeed, enforcement has brought some great successes in this regard. As I wrote on in my blog post on this subject (at http://sfconservancy.org/blog/2012/feb/01/gpl-enforcement/ ), both the OpenWRT and SamyGo firmware modification communities were launched because of source releases yielded in past BusyBox enforcement actions. Getting the "scripts to control compilation and installation of the executable" for those specific devices are what enabled these new upstream firmware projects to get started. > Does the product in question ship a patched busybox at all? Is > there any reason to believe that? This is hard to know when an enforcement actions begins; we don't normally find out until the end, because, of course, initially, there's no source to examine. Detailed and time-consuming analysis of the binary would be the only way to determine that up-front. > Now, to see in which position this would put busybox, my question is, > what has been gained so far from suing? Note again that very very few enforcement actions involved litigation. Of hundreds of enforcement actions, only about 17 were lawsuits. Most enforcement is a more-or-less friendly conversation and assistance given to help the company into compliance with the GPL. -- Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
