Choice of Licence

Posted Apr 11, 2016 8:13 UTC (Mon) by robbe (guest, #16131)
In reply to: Choice of Licence by anselm
Parent article: Why Zephyr?

> [...] manufacturers won't be too keen on the idea [...]

I don’t see this as a given. If I produce, say, an espresso machine, and want to make it WiFi-capable, would I really consider the small application that reports "water tank N % full, beans reservoir M % full" worthy of protection? Would my competitors gain valuable insight from reading its source code? Would copying it give them some advantage?

I suspect the answers are "not really" to both questions for a number of appliances. But maybe I am mistaken ... or enough companies are just paranoid about sharing their code.

I certainly can’t see the big security benefits if the OS gets patches, but not the bespoke application linked to it.

Choice of Licence

Posted Apr 11, 2016 8:43 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

If I produce, say, an espresso machine, and want to make it WiFi-capable, would I really consider the small application that reports "water tank N % full, beans reservoir M % full" worthy of protection?

Your developers might not, but your lawyers might. Usually in a company, what the lawyers say carries more weight than what the developers say.

Choice of Licence

Posted Apr 11, 2016 15:53 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I think Keurig(?) already did this, to protect their dirty business of DRMed coffee.