The FSF's being stupid again, it seems...

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 02:32:49PM -0400, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Thursday 29 June 2006 4:54 am, Riku Voipio wrote:
> > > But if somebody actually is using vanilla unmodified BusyBox
> > > 1.1.3, I'm actually more interested in confirming that and getting
> > > their .config file than getting another copy of the same source tarball.
> >
> > Please voice this to FSF - GPL3 is still WiP so they might actually
> > listen. I presume Harald Welte who deals with both busybox violations
> > and gplv3 would be good contact too.
> 
> I tried voicing to them my earlier objections about 5(c) in the current draft, 
> but couldn't get through to a human.  If that's still in there, it's a 
> blocker because it forces busybox to waste space, especially in our 
> planned "make standalone" mode.

If this stupid clause remains then yes it's a show-stopped for BB
being under GPLv3. It's not a problem at all tho for "v2 or later".

> > and through some other unlucky 
> > circumstances nobody else is distributing busybox 1.1.3 anymore. So
> > if the somebody does not have to distribute busybox 1.1.3 sources
> > with it's binaries, where would you get it?
> 
> If _nobody_ is distributing it, I'd presume a nuclear war or comet impact 
> occurred.  Even a sea level rise from global warming probably won't be 
> enough.

You're only thinking of the short-term future. I had a horrible time
trying to find ancient releases of FreeBSD and ancient GNU binutils
while doing research on the early evolution of dynamic linking and
a.out to elf migration. Eventually I did find most of what I wanted
but it was not at all easy or obvious.

These days it's getting even more common for people to delete all but
the most recent few versions from their ftp sites, and old releases
being entirely destroyed is a very serious possibility. Your examples
of movie files and such are not convincing; a lot more people are
interested in funny/cool movies than source code.

Rich