About the calculus for the project [LWN.net]

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 3, 2012 18:30 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by marcH
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

> 1. We do not have time to ask/check what our dodgy contractors are doing, (incredibly wrong in the first place)

I think that is a mischaracterization of the stated concern, its not that they are being willfully ignorant of their suppliers its that in a large organization it's easy for some team to accidentally distribute pirated software by not doing due diligence on the vendor (or the vendor lying). The belief, right or wrong, is that a hostile copyright owner could cause a lot of trouble so to reduce this risk they are going to work on liberally licensed software that they own the copyrights on so that the components they maintain don't have piracy issues and presumed-hostile copyright owners.

Maybe Bradly Kuhn is some moustache twirrling ogre who's just itching to screw over some poor defenseless large manufacturer, the people involved probably know better than I, but I don't see any evidence in the publicly available information to support that hypothesis.

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About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 3, 2012 23:33 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

> > 1. We do not have time to ask/check what our dodgy contractors are doing, (incredibly wrong in the first place)

> I think that is a mischaracterization of the stated concern, its not that they are being willfully ignorant of their suppliers its that in a large organization it's easy for some team to accidentally distribute pirated software by not doing due diligence on the vendor (or the vendor lying).

I think this is an overly nice way to say the exact same thing.

You MUST carefully select and watch your suppliers, period. Make sure they have a good reputation, tie them in very strict contracts, make sure they are too big too fail (and can pay you any damages back), force them to give you their source code and audit it yourself... this is really just business 101. If the managers of your company cut corners on business 101 in order to be first to market, then I sincerely hope your company dies in copyright litigations (GPL or else) because for sure my company forces us to be thorough and extremely careful, which obviously has a cost, and I would hate you beating us on the market because of that.

[Don't take it personally: it was just easier to give you the role of the bad guy]

> "Hostile Copyright Owner"

Too bad neither Hollywood nor the BSA never cared educating the masses with this new and interesting "HCO" concept.

Anyway I agree with i3839 to some extend. Even assuming that the most HCO owns and defends busybox today and that busybox gets successfully replaced, the most HCO will be someone owning something else in one year time and back to square one.

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 4, 2012 14:51 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

And by the way... http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2030258

"Some say the only two products not covered by product liability today are religion and software. For software that has to end;"

"If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then the builder shall be put to death." (Hammurabi's Code, approx. 1700 BC)

About the calculus for the project

Posted Feb 5, 2012 12:35 UTC (Sun) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (3 responses)

I was already ready to say that if such a rule would come to govern free software, then all software I would ever release, regardless of its purpose, would be strictly anonymous and in public domain, because it would be very hard to accept any kind of personal liability for software given out for free.

Then I read the link and observed it advocates liability only for closed source software, where the author of the software must be trusted, and eliminates it for software with source code, where the user could (in theory) become fully informed consumer of the software product.

business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 9:03 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

Another quote from the same article:

"if you make MONEY selling something, you'd better do it properly, or you will be held responsible for the trouble it causes" (emphasis is mine).

It's really more about *business* rather than closed source. If you sell open source then you are accountable (or should be). If you give closed source software for free then you should not. In the latter case you typically do not even know who is using the software and for what.

business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 11:31 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

I think there's no point to make it hinge on money exchanging hands, especially as a liability rule such as this would lead to it being a standard practice to obfuscate this sort of liabilities.

business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 16:47 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

The reason money is a factor (AFAICT) is that in many cases your liability is limited to what you were paid for the product. Ergo, if you give something away for free, your liability is minimal, whereas if you sell it, your liability could potentially be greater than your net profits.