[BusyBox] [PATCH] networking/ping.c

[M. R. Brown]

* Neal H Walfield <neal at cs.uml.edu> on Thu, Jan 31, 2002:

> 
> If you think that the FSF will control the code that you write after
> having assigned your copyright to them, you are quite mistaken and
> need to reread the copyright assignment contract.
> 

This has been proven wrong by RMS himself, many, many times.  The more
recent time this has come up is the phpGroupWare GIF issue, and before
that it was glibc.

> One point of the GPL is wide distribution: something that I think most
> of us on this list agree is a Good Thing.  However, the GPL does not,
> and cannot, enforce the terms of your copyright: _only_ the copyright
> holder can.  If the copyright holder is unavailable, then there is _no
> one_ that can defend it.  For instance, Evil Corporation comes and
> uses your code under the GPL in a closed source proprietary product
> and you are missing or unavailable.  Conclusion: Evil Corporation has
> won.
> 
> It becomes even more difficult when there are multiple copyright
> holders.  In this case, if anyone of them does not cooperate
> (including being unreachable), the attacker has, once again, won
> without a battle.
> 

This is true, but for most projects it's a non-issue.  Have you been to
freshmeat.net lately?  How many OSS projects do they list?  How many of the
projects are actually used/useful?

Plain fact is, if Evil Corporation is big enough and wants it bad enough,
they can take it from *anyone*, including the FSF.

> 
> So, my question to you Aaron, is: what community are you part of: the
> Free Software Community or the proprietary software community?  By not
> the supporting the assignment of copyright to, e.g. the FSF, the
> XFree86 group, et al, I can only assume that you are part of the
> latter.

This is the de facto cry of FSF trolls.  There is no black and white
software ethical neo-political society, no matter how much the FSF and it's
pundits would like you to believe.  People can choose whatever software
license (or no license) for whatever *they* write, this is the
exclusitivity of copyright law.  It's childish of you to try to bully
others into your beliefs, but it's nothing new where the FSF are concerned.

Plain fact is, Busybox will most likely remain community-controlled, so
there's no point continuing this useless thread.

M. R.
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