The software freedom conservancy does NOT own the copyright on busybox, the copyrights are retained by the original contributors. The SFLC signed on to represent individual copyright holders (originally Erik and myself, later Erik and Denys). The conservancy then split off from the SFLC in some kind of falling out I never got the details of, and the gpl at busybox address goes to the conservancy now. The SFLC is essentially mothballed as far as I know (I think Eben Moglen went back to teaching) and the conservancy is... Bradley Kuhn, I think?
The lawsuits turned into a big self-financing thing where each settlement netted them somewhere around $20k and they used that to fund the next suit, and our involvement consisted of signing papers and mailing them back. (They decided to make an example of somebody once, and then we actually received a nice check. Most of the time, they just got expenses and we didn't get anything, but we weren't in it for the money. But as I said, I stopped being involved years ago, maybe the conservancy does things differently than SFLC did...)
There's nothing to stop other random contributors over the years (Manuel Nova, Glenn McGrath, etc) from getting their own legal representation and launching their own lawsuits, if they wanted to. Just like with the Linux kernel. (Although as project maintainers we had an easier time proving standing.) The fact is I withdrew my support from the lawsuits at the end of 2008 (when they attacked Cisco while I was _working_ with Cisco; my approach was effective, theirs threw a wrench in the works), but they continued with Erik and Denys as plaintiffs.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at nvidia. Ex-biologist. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon and Bluesky.
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Re: You?
Date: 2012-01-31 06:54 pm (UTC)The lawsuits turned into a big self-financing thing where each settlement netted them somewhere around $20k and they used that to fund the next suit, and our involvement consisted of signing papers and mailing them back. (They decided to make an example of somebody once, and then we actually received a nice check. Most of the time, they just got expenses and we didn't get anything, but we weren't in it for the money. But as I said, I stopped being involved years ago, maybe the conservancy does things differently than SFLC did...)
There's nothing to stop other random contributors over the years (Manuel Nova, Glenn McGrath, etc) from getting their own legal representation and launching their own lawsuits, if they wanted to. Just like with the Linux kernel. (Although as project maintainers we had an easier time proving standing.) The fact is I withdrew my support from the lawsuits at the end of 2008 (when they attacked Cisco while I was _working_ with Cisco; my approach was effective, theirs threw a wrench in the works), but they continued with Erik and Denys as plaintiffs.