dual licensing for libbusybox

[Jason Schoon]

I would agree with Mike that it would be desirable to have the shared
library under LGPL.  Busybox itself is great as GPL because it is
standalone.  You can use it in a commercial, embedded product, and it is
perfectly fine because your proprietary apps don't link with it.

However, the point of a shared library to really be useful is to link to it,
thus bringing all linked code under its license (GPL in this case).

Now, that said, I completely understand why this is not the way Busybox will
go.  Contacting every author and getting permission to relicense under LGPL
would be nearly impossible.  The product didn't start out LGPL, so it makes
perfect sense to have it continue with GPL, shared library or not.

Obviously, as stated before, I am not a lawyer either.  I just try to keep
as close of tabs on these issues as possible, and apply some common sense.
I think it is that common sense part that keeps me an engineer, rather than
a lawyer though :-)


On 3/1/06, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday 01 March 2006 6:33 pm, 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 :)
>
> Well, it's certainly expected.  I mentioned it earlier.
>
> > 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 ?
>
> A) We'd have to track down every contributor and get permission.
> B) Do we want to export a stable, documented API?
>
> If we just export a stable and documented API, then people who link
> against
> the API aren't necessarily derived works of our code.  (They're derived
> works
> of our API.  The implementation could be anything.)
>
> Keep in mind that the linux-kernel headers are all GPL (not LGPL), and yet
> every binary in the world #includes them, without necessarily becoming
> GPL.
> How do they get away with that?  Simple, people program to books, man
> pages,
> standards like POSIX.  Thus their code is not a derived work of the linux
> kernel, so what license the kernel is under is irrelevant.
>
> So we're not in a position to re-license libbb, but we could probably
> document
> an API.  I'm not sure that's a good idea though, since then _we_ wouldn't
> be
> able to arbitrarily break it, and we may still want to.
>
> > -mike
>
> Rob
> --
> Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.
> _______________________________________________
> busybox mailing list
> busybox at busybox.net
> http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/busybox
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/attachments/20060301/787be1ee/attachment.htm