On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 16:17, Brian T. Sniffen wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes: > > > Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > >> Forced publication of in-house development considerably increases the > >> cost of running software. > > > > This is only true when you adopt a "high falutin" concept of > > "publication". > > > > Make a tar file, put it on a web site, a five minute job. Advertise a > > bug-reporting and comments mailing address, and then a reflector on > > that list which says "sorry, but we don't have the time or resources > > to answer your email or even read it." Another five minutes. > > That's not sufficient for a modern corporation: you have a duty to the > shareholders to carefully examine all the code before publishing it, > to ensure that no competitive advantage is lost or corporate resource > squandered. You might have proprietary information embedded in the > code (database passwords in your PHP-Nuke modifications, for example) > or sensitive information in comments. > > It takes at least a couple of developers to read the entire source > you're about to publish, together with an IP lawyer and somone versed > in the operations of the company available to answer their questions.
This is true any time you publish source code. Will you suggest that section 3 (requiring the publishing of source code when binaries are distributed) be stricken for this reason too? > When you set up the mailing address, you're advertising it as a way to > contact your company about these issues; I'm not a lawyer, but don't > you have a responsibility to live up to that obligation? No. > Not to > mention the public relations hit from just spewing your code out > there: this community is fickle, and a poorly done release is a great > way to annoy it. None of this mailing list stuff has anything to do with the actual AGPL. -- -Dave Turner Stalk Me: 617 441 0668 "On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock." -Thomas Jefferson