[Toybox] Why does wikipedia[citation needed] keep doing this?

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Mon Jul 12 05:05:25 PDT 2021


Somebody out there REALLY hates the fact that 0BSD is successful, and seeks to
undermine it at every opportunity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toybox&type=revision&diff=1031014292&oldid=1030207594

What POSSIBLE RELEVANCE does it have that toybox hasn't been under any license
but 0BSD for eight years? That's longer than
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection has been GPLv3 but that
page doesnt' mention GPLv2 (or v1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux doesn't
say that releases before 0.1.2 were under a "no commercial use" license. The
ONLY thing this can do is confuse people.

And of course the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause_license_(%22BSD_Zero_Clause_License%22)
page still calls 0BSD the Free Free Free as in Free Software is Not Open Source
All Hail Richard Stallman Public License, despite me going back to the OSI
mailing list and reminding them that they agreed to remove their mistake (which
happened because a new person came onboard and reverted something without being
aware of the history) so they fixed the osi page. (The license was both merged
into android and approved by SPDX under the name zero clause bsd before it was
ever _submitted_ to OSI under another name. OSI did not do their homework.

I too am sorry that the Richard Stallman's greed destroyed copyleft, but if you
break "the GPL" into warring camps where the linux kernel and samba can't share
code anymore even though they implement two ends of the same protocol and are
both GPL, it's gonna decline in popularity. LLVM exists entirely because gcc
moved to GPLv3. Heck, the Samba maintainer has publicly stated he regrets the
move to GPLv3, and said it was "rejected soundly". He gave a whole talk about it
here:

  https://archive.org/details/copyleftconf2020-allison

I strongly suspect the reason 0BSD gets blowback is it's SUCCESSFUL. It's passed
31,000 repositories licensed under it on github, and counting:
https://github.com/search?q=license%3A0bsd&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=&l=

Rob


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