Meaningless numbers

Posted Sep 15, 2009 0:59 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: FOSS license compliance in the consumer electronics market

A compliance check at this stage would raise the price of the product by 6

No. It raises the cost to the producer by that amount, not the price. Furthermore, the per-unit cost of a sample run is very nearly a meaningless quantity: e.g., to reduce their per-unit cost by hundreds or even thousands of euros, they need only run off twice as many units. The cost of one cycle of plastic tooling typically far exceeds any compliance cost.

The problem is clearly not a matter of cost. Using non-free software typically costs much more. It is, rather, that entities that are not used to having to deal with licensing obligations (because they are used to that having been taken care of upstream) are obliged to do some of it themselves. Since the only part they need to do involves the Free Software part of the product, and it's easy to do, with no money changing hands, the upstream suppliers can and should just provide detailed compliance instructions as part of their delivery.