Time Limit
Posted Apr 15, 2005 6:46 UTC (Fri) by
Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to:
Time Limit by ncm
Parent article:
An injunction against Fortinet for GPL violations
Exactly, only I believe the time limit is four weeks (perhaps your 30
days?). Harald Welte has mentioned this specifically before, as an
important aspect of the situation. He makes the companies aware of the
situation and the ticking clock in his warnings, and has observed that in
most cases it tends to bring companies that otherwise might wish to drag
things out for years, until the product is no longer on the market anyway
and they've moved on, to the the table much faster. With the clock
ticking like that, they have little recourse. If for whatever reason they
can't move fast enough, they end up with an injunction. However, AFAIK,
it has only gone that far a couple times, both ending up in our favor,
because most companies have sense enough to see the light, and recognize
they are over a barrel.
In many cases, the company hadn't the foggiest idea it was open source
code, either, because they bought it from some fly-by-nite Chinese company
or the like, and any assurances re source origin they got were entirely
worthless. At that point, they pretty much haven't a choice but to make
public their code, and in the future either resolve to check things more
thoroughly, /not/ always taking the low or fastest available bid, or
decide from the experience that it wasn't so bad after all, and they make
a point after that to check for releasable code and do so if they can.
Unfortunately, I don't know which reaction is more common, but in either
case, they end up with a better respect for GPL code, which in itself is
useful, as it strenthens the guarantees that the GPL offer.
Duncan
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