Talk:BusyBox

First GPL lawsuit?

I'm confused by this sentence:

   What was claimed to be the first US lawsuit over a GPL violation concerned use of BusyBox in an embedded device.

It implies that someone claimed this was the first US lawsuit over a GPL violation but there's some reason to doubt that person. My guess is the intent was only to offer some uncertainty but even that seems unnecessary. It either was the first US GPL lawsuit or it wasn't. I'm no law expert so if there really is a good reason this is uncertain then that should be explained in the article. Otherwise it should just say that this is the first US GPL lawsuit. --Praxeolitic (talk) 00:45, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Untitled

"or example just

   /bin/ls

after /bin/ls is linked to /bin/busybox." I think there should be an additional 'ls' in the end - like '/bin/busybox ls'

I thought the way BusyBox worked was that 'ls' and friends were symlinked to /bin/busybox and then when the binary was run, it figured out under what name it was called and then manifested appropriate behavior? --Gwern (contribs) 19:13 7 June 2007 (GMT)

It works both ways. "ln -s /bin/busybox /bin/ls; /bin/ls > test1; /bin/busybox ls > test2; cmp test1 test2 || echo wtf;"

author vs developer

The sidebar makes a distinction between developers and authors. I don't understand the distinction.

Perhaps "Author" means "Designer". This is suggested by the links involved. If so, that word should be used.

Perhaps "Author" is meant to convey "Project Founder" (but from what I understand that isn't accurate).

Perhaps "Author" just means "original developer". That terminology makes sense.

I'm not going to "be bold" and change it because I don't know what is intended to be conveyed. Could someone who does please explain? DHR 04:36, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Looking through the talk pages for the templates, I think author is being used in the sense of 'original developer' - so all authors would be developers, but not all developers are the author(s). --Gwern (contribs) 16:12 21 September 2007 (GMT)

Author's the guy that owns the copyright. 67.49.101.105 (talk) 23:07, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

Which copyright? Nothing is mentioned about copyright assignment, which means that each developer owns a copyright on their contributions in particular and busybox in general. --Gwern (contribs) 19:10 15 February 2010 (GMT)

The idea is not based on any of the people mentioned in this article. The idea to add plenty of builtins in a shell is from David Korn. David added plenty of data base funtions as builtins to a special variant of the Bourne Shell in 1982 and he added plenty of UNIX tools to ksk93 in 1993 already. Busybox is just a combination of the Almquist shell and reimplementations if UNIX tools. Schily (talk) 09:47, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

right to bring suit

"It should be noted that no other prior developers including original author Bruce Perens and long time maintainer Dave Cinege were represented in these actions raising questions as to Anderson and Landley's copyright claims and standing to bring suit.[citation needed]"

Of course any copyright holder can bring a suit. The quoted text is silly. On the other hand, any copyright holder not involved in a settlement ought to be able to bring more suits.DHR (talk) 04:29, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

The reference to "^ Bruce Perens, "Statement on Busybox lawsuits", perens.com(December 15, 2009)." appears to be dead, the blog's been removed from the wayback machine too. Nasukaren (talk) 11:32, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

ease of reading

This article is very hard to understand for those not familiar with programming. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.35.47.1 (talk) 23:39, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

The article does not state what BusyBox actually IS. Is it a Linux distribution, or just a suite of programs that run on Linux? Philu (talk) 23:20, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Memory requirements

The article asserts that BusyBox gives a saving of both disk space and memory when compared with the utilities it replaces. I can see how the disk space saving is achieved but the memory saving needs to be explained as I would expect the BusyBox executable to have a considerably larger memory footprint than any one of the individual utilities. 83.104.249.240 (talk) 16:00, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

News

Mr. Langley is not a developer anymore, he states this on his personal page at [1]. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.114.14.56 (talk) 19:33, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

Claims by Toybox developer Rob Landley

At[ http://landley.net/toybox/ ], Rob Landley, the developer of Toybox, says this:

'CELF/ELC talk and Wikipedia[citation needed] article'

I gave another State Of The Toybox talk (video, outline), in which I repeat my perennial complaint that Wikipedia[citation needed] still says toybox was relicensed before its hiatus, when relicensing was why the hiatus ended.

Since Wikipedia[citation needed] seems unable to do the most basic research on this point, and has stuck to an incorrect sequence of events for years, I've been gradually escalating my attempts to correct them. Toybox came out of mothballs in November 2011 because it could be relicensed. That's what opened up a new niche busybox wasn't already filling with a 10 year headstart.

The article has plenty of smaller issues*, but given that I gave an entire talk at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013 (outline, audio) on why I switched away from GPL for my projects, that one bugs me.

(Note: The [citation needed] tags are in the original.)

I would like to address these comments by Rob Landley and either correct our article or document with citations to reliable sources our reasons for retaining the current version. Comments? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:35, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

BTW, this blog entry[1] is especially interesting. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Removal of support for systemd

Any need to mention, that busybox is one of the first to completely drop systemd-support (http://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=accd9eeb719916da974584b33b1aeced5f3bb346)? Or would that lead to yet another flame war? 2A02:908:E942:3920:AA7D:994D:5E82:343F (talk) 07:04, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

IBM?

Reference 38 is nonsense- goes to some IBM marketing page. What was the intention here? Hskrivervik (talk) 20:06, 21 June 2017 (UTC)