dual licensing for libbusybox

[Erik Andersen]

On Wed Mar 01, 2006 at 06:33:25PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> with support being added for a shared busybox library, there is
> the "small" issue of the new libbusybox being under the GPL ...
> i'm not sure if this is intended, and if it is, then this
> thread can die now :)
> 
> i dont think it'd be such a bad idea keeping busybox source
> under the GPL, but allowing people to link against libbusybox
> itself in a LGPL style ...  thoughts ?

Personally, I'd rather keep all my BusyBox code under the GPL,
even the stuff included in libbb.  But even if _I_ were persuaded
to relicense my parts of libbb, it would be a terribly painful
process to properly vet all the code and ensure all the authors
and all contributors (who contributed patches under the
understanding that the code they were working on was GPL) had
been located and had similarly authorized such a re-licensing.

<tedious and boring ancient history follows>

In the bad old days, the stuff provided by libbb lived in a
single 'utility.c' file.  Which of course was GPL'd just like all
the rest of BusyBox.  Then I discovered that by using some
Makefile magic I could compile each function from utility.c into
its own separate .o file, thus letting gcc prune out unused code
when linking.  This was a very good thing, since as I made BusyBox
more and more configurable, removing dead code became essential
for keeping things small.

Eventually, utility.c became huge and unwieldy as more and more
useful general functions were added.  So I split it up into a
bunch of separate files, and collected all the separate .o files
into an 'ar' archive.  With my characteristicly amazing creativity
I dubbed this newly split up pile of random stuff 'libbb'.

I personally wrote much of the oldest bits, along with some help
from my friend Mark (original author of the recently discussed
busybox 'grep') and there are probably a few lingering lines of
code remaining from Bruce as well.  Later, as others began
contributing to utility.c, attribution for all such changes was
not very carefully tracked.  Newer stuff of course has been
properly marked in svn as to who wrote or contributed it.

So while in theory, it might be possible, after an extensive
search through all my ancient email, to determine the exact set
of authors and patch submitters for each line of code presently
in libbb, and contact each one of them, and get a written GPL ->
LGPL transition approval, in practice this is simply not gonna
happen.  Thus libbb is GPL and GPL it is going to remain.

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen             http://codepoet-consulting.com/
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