This weekend's witch-hunt

[Bruce Perens]

Dear Busybox folks,

Last week, I obejcted to Rob Landley changing the license statement on 
portions of the busybox code that I wrote. After some (acrimonious, on 
his part) discussion, I left him a final directive: note that Busybox 
contains some of code copyrighted by me, and that it my code should be 
licensable under the GPL, irrespective of version. This corresponds to 
the license preference on my original release of the software.

The sensible action for Rob to have taken, at that point, would have 
been to insert a two-sentence note into the Busybox license that would 
have looked like this:

    Portions of this program are copyrighed by Bruce Perens. Those 
portions may be used under the GNU General Public License, irrespective 
of version.

That declaration would have respected my rights as a copyright holder, 
and would have allowed Rob to make the license change to GPL2 only for 
the overall program that he wished.

Having added that declaration, Rob could have gone on with his life as a 
productive coder. Instead, Rob embarked on a days-long forensic 
analysis, his log of which is visible at

http://busybox.net/~landley/notes.html
and
http://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt

It appears that he's putting in a great deal of work to remove all 
traces of Bruce Perens from the Busybox software. He's missed pieces, 
but I feel little motivation to assist him by naming them.

I think it would be fair to classify his behavior as "over the top". I 
don't believe my correspondence here has been sufficient cause for this 
extremely nonlinear response. However, it's free software, and Rob has 
the right to do what he did. You, however, might want to think twice 
before you go along with this strangeness.

I've been guilty of "over the top" behavior in my time, and can 
sympathize with Rob while at the same time I don't want to leave him in 
charge of the only development version of Busybox. I have respect for 
Rob as a coder and great respect for Erik who put in a tremendous lot of 
work on this program.
I do not feel a need to be the major coder of Busybox, but feel that a 
fork is necessary and will put in the work to make one.

I once was very successful in distributing the Debian base system 
development to many separate package maintainers, having got it as one 
monolithic package. Perhaps this is possible. I see some new technical 
directions that are possible.

    Thanks

    Bruce