About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 1, 2012 22:44 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by tbird20d
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

> For a large company that is compliant with the GPL, the biggest worry is that a 3rd party (and a legally hostile one at that) would be given the right to review (and therefore delay) the shipment of its products.

It is really hard to feel sorry for a rich multinational company that skips mandatory legal checks in order to be first to market.

It then becomes much much harder to feel sorry when the very same company is lobbying hard to harden copyright law so teenagers illegally downloading music can be put in jail. Compared to this the SFC now look like very nice guys.

Note: this has nothing to do with the GPL. It's about software licensing and legal reviews *in general*.

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 9, 2012 21:35 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (1 responses)

> It is really hard to feel sorry for a rich multinational company that
> skips mandatory legal checks in order to be first to market.
...
> Note: this has nothing to do with the GPL. It's about software licensing
> and legal reviews *in general*.

A quote from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/linus_pr.html

"I do not look up any patents on principle because (a) it's a horrible waste of time and (b) I don't want to know,"

- Linus Torvalds.

Rob

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 12, 2012 15:35 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Nobody ever looks up patents. Every large software company I have ever worked for specifically forbids its developers from doing patent searches without the cooperation of the corporation's top lawyer, which says something about how common they expect such things to be. (From asking a few such people, the number of patent searches they actually get asked to do by software developers is one or two a *year*. In large multinationals.)