That's not the reason, and I know because I'M THE ONE WHO DID IT.
I'm the one who connected busybox with SFLC, because when I became BusyBox maintainer I inherited Erik Anderson's "hall of shame" page, and couldn't maintain that part of the project. So I went "if this is really an issue, let's deal with it properly", and asked around about pro-bono legal representation, and Pamela Jones of Groklaw gave me contact info for the SFLC.
I started this process, and Erik went along with _me_. And the objective was to shake these guys down for THEIR BUSYBOX CODE. Not for other projects' code, and not for money (although money is how you get their attention). I continued for a year, and at the end of that year we had not gotten a single line of busybox code added to the repository because of all this.
I note that gpl-violations.org already existed at that point, with Harald Welte suing over kernel stuff before the SFLC was founded. We felt no need to handle that because somebody else was already doing it.
The lawyers had a larger agenda, but the engineers didn't. But their main agenda was to get paid: the SFLC made sure that everybody they contacted paid them $20k for legal fees, so they could afford to keep doing it. Whatever the outcome code-wise, the SFLC got paid, so of course they kept filing suits. The first I _heard_ of most of these companies was when the SFLC informed me we were suing them. (Presumably Erik had lots of complaints he'd never acted upon, and then there was the gpl@busybox address.)
The SFLC never asked "what code do we get out of this". They got their $20k. Whatever happened, the lawyers got paid, bring on the next lawsuit!
This self-perpetuating lawsuit machine is what the FSF hijacked to stop all internal Linux development at Cisco. that had the potential of producing some great code, they were ALREADY planning to release it, and the FSF got those engineers reassigned and the division dissolved. (I was there when it happened, as was mirell.org.)
From an engineering perspective, destroying Linksys was a BAD THING.
You're complaining about the loss of side effects you like. I'm pissed about A) the complete failure of the original purpose, B) massively counterproductive side effects that would have made the original purpose not worth it anyway.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
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Date: 2012-01-31 07:11 pm (UTC)I'm the one who connected busybox with SFLC, because when I became BusyBox maintainer I inherited Erik Anderson's "hall of shame" page, and couldn't maintain that part of the project. So I went "if this is really an issue, let's deal with it properly", and asked around about pro-bono legal representation, and Pamela Jones of Groklaw gave me contact info for the SFLC.
I started this process, and Erik went along with _me_. And the objective was to shake these guys down for THEIR BUSYBOX CODE. Not for other projects' code, and not for money (although money is how you get their attention). I continued for a year, and at the end of that year we had not gotten a single line of busybox code added to the repository because of all this.
I note that gpl-violations.org already existed at that point, with Harald Welte suing over kernel stuff before the SFLC was founded. We felt no need to handle that because somebody else was already doing it.
The lawyers had a larger agenda, but the engineers didn't. But their main agenda was to get paid: the SFLC made sure that everybody they contacted paid them $20k for legal fees, so they could afford to keep doing it. Whatever the outcome code-wise, the SFLC got paid, so of course they kept filing suits. The first I _heard_ of most of these companies was when the SFLC informed me we were suing them. (Presumably Erik had lots of complaints he'd never acted upon, and then there was the gpl@busybox address.)
The SFLC never asked "what code do we get out of this". They got their $20k. Whatever happened, the lawyers got paid, bring on the next lawsuit!
This self-perpetuating lawsuit machine is what the FSF hijacked to stop all internal Linux development at Cisco. that had the potential of producing some great code, they were ALREADY planning to release it, and the FSF got those engineers reassigned and the division dissolved. (I was there when it happened, as was mirell.org.)
From an engineering perspective, destroying Linksys was a BAD THING.
You're complaining about the loss of side effects you like. I'm pissed about A) the complete failure of the original purpose, B) massively counterproductive side effects that would have made the original purpose not worth it anyway.