[Aboriginal] Pondering license change GPL->MIT.

[David Seikel]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:02:16 -0500 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> So a year or two back I switched toybox from GPL to BSD after doing  
> some serious historical auditing. My recent Ohio LinuxFest talk (the  
> rise and fall of copyleft) may eventually have recordings up. But
> the real trigger was this thread that wandered by recently on the
> buildroot list:
> 
>     
> http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2013-September/078330.html
> 
> (I don't hugely follow that list but I created it abusing my root  
> powers on the busybox/uClibc server to kick the traffic off the
> uClibc list, and then never unsubscribed from it...)
> 
> And they're wasting huge amounts of time going on about how the GPL  
> applies to a bunch of makefiles and shell scripts that don't
> directly produce binary output. What does the GPL mean when there's
> no binary version of the code to distribute separately from a source
> version? (How can you be on the hook to distribute source if you
> never distributed binaries because there's no binary version?)
> 
> Aboriginal is a bunch of bash scripts. It's gplv2 because when I  
> started this project GPL was The License. Now there's no such thing
> as "The GPL" (the Linux kernel and Samba can't share code, even
> though both are gpl and implement 2 ends of the same protocol).
> 
> So I'm thinking of switching to the "zero clause BSD" toybox
> license, which looks enough like BSD to reassure people but is
> actually effectively public domain:
> 
> http://landley.net/toybox/license.html
> 
> I need to go through the source control history and find third party  
> changes I've merged, but there actually aren't that many. (I've
> taken ideas from people, but mostly not code.)
> 
> $ hg log -v | grep '^user:' | sort -u
> user:        Alessio Igor Bogani <alessiogirobogani at gmail.com>
> user:        Alessio Igor Bogani <alessioigorbogani at gmail.com>
> user:        Eric S. Raymond <esr at thyrsus.com>
> user:        landley at driftwood
> user:        Marc Andre Tanner <mat at brain-dump.org>
> user:        Mark Miller <mark at mirell.org>
> user:        Rob Landley <rob at landley.net>
> 
> Not a big list...
> 
> The largest lump of gplv2 code in the project is ccwrap, which I'm
> in the process of rewriting anyway. (Yeah, been stalled for a while.  
> Working on it...)
> 
> So I just thought I'd throw that out there. Shouldn't make any  
> difference to anyone but me, but "GPL for a bunch of bash scripts"
> has struck me as funny for years...

I'm not on that list, though you do have some "source code" from me
(sources/targets/i486), and maybe a tiny patch or two.  I agree with
this change.

-- 
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.
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