On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 9:23 PM, G. Clifford Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks I appreciate that and I'll surely take you up on that it I think it'll > help me win one of these battles. > > The bottom line is that many commercial entities frown on GPL licensed > software. Legal departments go ape when someone brings in new software and 1) > it's "free" and 2) it's "GPL'd". > For one particular client I'd built a front-end management interface to some > system configs (firewalls, software packages, etc... ). This was something > they were distributing to their clients as part of a bundle. When told that > it would be built with a Python web framework, they assumed it would be > Django. When I was done with it and had turned in my documentation they had a > fit. I got calls from the CTO asking why I would put them in such a position. > They didn't know whether I'd modified anything that was "...part of web2py", > and if I had they wanted to know whether it was "...configuration or code". > The only GPL'd apps they ship to customers are compiled binaries. They wanted > me to 'decouple' what I'd done and submit it for review by their one internal > python guy so that he could determine whether anything in my code was > 'stolen' from web2py.
The legal guys at my company are not able to vet 2 GPL and 2 BSD apps for corporate use after 2 months of research. People are stupid like that. I'm actually quite fascinated about how stupid they get sometimes. You know. M$ gives you a long-ass EULA, and most of it is mumbo-jumbo, and nobody ever questions it. If you look at the EULA for Corel Draw, for example, you find out that you aren't even permitted to use the software for "any purpose". It's clearly defined what's allowed and what's not. I'm not talking about where you can or cannot install. It covers shit like what you can DRAW with it. Yet this type of BS makes perfect sense to them. And GPL doesn't. Nobody ever checked stuff I was drawing and vetted them with the legal. And they're taking 2 months just to decide whether I can have Blender and Inkscape installed on my workstation. -- Branko Vukelić [email protected] [email protected] Check out my blog: http://www.brankovukelic.com/ Check out my portfolio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxbunny/ Registered Linux user #438078 (http://counter.li.org/) I hang out on identi.ca: http://identi.ca/foxbunny Gimp Brushmakers Guild http://bit.ly/gbg-group
