> > I think in the end he disowned Busybox and started a new project to do the same thing, under the BSD licence.
>
> No, that was Tim Bird of Sony, who wanted to create "toybox" as a means of replacing Busybox so that GPL
> violations of the kernel harder to detect.

No, toybox is by me, Rob Landley, ex-maintainer of busybox, and the guy who hooked busybox up with the SFLC to start legal enforcement of the GPL in the first place. Tim has nothing to do with it (other than writing the first pass of the "id" command implementation, which has since been replaced).

But thanks for trying to FUD an open source project. We people who actually write code really appreciate the efforts of those like yourself who don't to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about our efforts.

Rob

All of these people make arguments that are based on faith and hand waving. While I will freely admit that arguments the other direction are no better, I do not think that making a snarky conclusion that it isn't money is a justifiable opinion based on any of the available arguments.

Executables are demand paged. I'm not convinced that it will be largely long, contiguous reads.

Your comment reminds me of "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov. Except there it was the computers what were too large and, once sufficiently capable, people that were installed to effect gains in miniaturization and computing efficiency!

Maybe you're right. But I strongly suspect that if I profiled disk accesses that I would see the SSD being hit for reads far more often than my home directory. But I should do that just to be sure.

Hah, hah. Very funny. In what way are they not money?

Unfortunately for your logic, bitcoin keeps on ending up with more people using it. It's not a rocket growth curve to be sure. But it isn't negative either.

I've met the VC (actually angel investor) in question. He's a really good and honest guy. He's not a shark.

This is due to two problems. First, the changeover to new management had not been completed yet, and when one of their systems was hacked it gave an opening to hack the trading site itself. This was a really serious failure, but also understandable since they hadn't finished auditing things to figure out how to secure them.

The second problem is that Bitoinica was hacked together quickly by a very talented individual without a lot of experience. He didn't cover his bases. The lack of backups is one of the major bases he didn't cover. He did at least take the precaution of making sure most of the bitcoins his trading platform was managing were in an offline wallet, which is why bitcoinica lost 80k USD work of bitcoins instead of some much larger amount.

I trust this far more than I trust the legal framework surrounding our current banks. If they're big enough, they don't really have to comply with the law, just give the appearance of doing so. Most of our laws and regulations designed to reign in larger business actually work that way. They might accomplish something for a few years, but as soon as people stop paying really close attention the regulators start acting on the behalf of the industry they regulate instead of the people they're supposed to be serving.

The amount of money that was stolen was only a fairly small fraction of the total money held by the exchange. The site designer at least had the good sense to keep most of the site's money in offline storage.

Of course, the lack of database backups make it really difficult to figure out who's money it is now. :-/