Corporate decision making

Posted Apr 11, 2016 22:53 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
In reply to: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation? by mjg59
Parent article: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

No company ever makes the best possible decision. People have to make the best possible decision in the available time.

For almost all software (other than revenue-generating proprietary, which is more and more a special case), it's in the company's interest to go Free.

But internal advocates for going Free have to make a case for it. In my experience copyleft can help there.

If the decision is set up as "comply with the license, at a small cost" vs. "violate the license and take some risk" it's easier for that internal advocate to get the company to do the right thing than if the advocate has to argue for doing the extra work of a Free release, for questionable future benefits.

(When I was in the position of the internal advocate, I got the company to comply, but it was easier to do a source release of all the non-copylefted stuff at the same time, so it all went out. But would not have been possible without copyleft helping to frame the decision.)