begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 10:05:44PM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: > > is solvable by the application of money. Errors with GPL'd code are > > solvable only by pouring the lifeblood of the company on to the ground. > > ...or by just removing the GPL'd code.
>From delivered products? Taking six months to remove, recode, and rerun the test suite? And then deliver the revised product to the customer? That'll significantly impair customer relations (why are you replacing working software?), stymie development (what do you mean we have to recode that module?), and introduce bugs. > > I know of at least one company that killed a product when threated by > > GPL Nazis 'cuz their product wrote configuration files for a GPL'd > > project. > > What company/product was this and what GPL'd project did it write config > files for? On what basis did the GPL Freedom Fighters (hey, I can spin > too!) threaten them if they were not using any GPL'd code in their product? I'm not at liberty[1] to reveal the company name (and thus not the project as well). From what I heard, the case had no merit, as generating config files is not an infringement. It was the _threat_ of a lawsuit that the (small) company couldn't afford to handle. Realize that this qualifies as hearsay, and appropriate amounts of salt should be ingested. You don't need to actually have a *winnable* case if you sue a lot of companies... they'll go under just paying the legal expenses should the be sued at all. Much simpler to simply kill the product line and trash the code, to the detriment of all. (I once worked for a company where the corporate policy to being sued was to file for bankruptcy should anything end up in court.) You do realize the "Freedom Fighters" is a euphemism for "terrorist", doncha? (It fits, too...) > > It's that sort of attitude, I think, that will keep Linux from ever > > becoming truly "mainstream". Who wants to deal with a vendor who so > > easily wishes ill on a customer 'cuz it's deserved? > > So easily? It takes an awful lot to wish that sort of thing on someone. Only among reasonable people. Zealots, on the other hand, wish that sort of thing with abandon. Just read /. for awhile. :) > Using the whole Linux kernel, the product of gazillions of man hours of > work, and not releasing the source in violation of the license is no > little thing. It is also a trivially avoidable thing. Yes. They go license an M$ OS, and Linux is shunted to the sidelines. Where the benefit to the users now? > I've worked for a lot of companies now, some small and some large, who > all used open source software and I have never once heard any of them > express any concern over this issue which leads me to believe it is > really a non-issue. I've watched managers decide against using anything open-source and _pay_ for inferior software that granted unrestricted licenses because they didn't want the hassle of dealing with GPL issues. And you know, I can't say they're wrong. It's cheaper to pay $5,000 for a component than to hire the lawyers and engineers to make sure that released code is actually releasable. We used to have a software ecology where using software that you had purchased resulted in products that were constrained by the vendor; they owned a piece of what you had used that software for. Typically they wanted royalties, but what upset everyone is that they kept their finger in the pie. Commercial software has mostly gotten over that. "Free" software, oddly enough, _hasn't_. > Andrew's company may forbid the use of GPL'd > software but given the very widespread use of Linux in corporate America > today we can be sure they are in a very small minority. You're confusing the issue. USING Linux is different from building on it. [1] Not a company I've ever worked for, and I'm probably not supposed to know as much as I do about the event. I refuse to get my source in (potential) trouble, plus this makes it hearsay... but it's plausible. Everytime I see the /. chant of 'sue em!' it becomes moreso. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
