The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 1, 2016 10:54 UTC (Thu) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
Parent article: The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

I think Linus's idea that companies are emotional beasts sulk and never talk to you again if you threaten to sue them is quite hilarious. Companies don't have memory or feelings, the day the threat is over, they will look at what is the best way to make profit of the new situation. Also, the idea that lawsuits and their threats are somehow rare and exceptional for companies. Example: After pestering for weeks, one day customer X was finally sued for not paying in time - magically the bill was paid next day and all things settled. Next week we were already pitching the next project to them, which they happily bought.

Oh and that bit of "goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice." The irony of claiming in the very middle of a heated discussion where you are shouting at others to be known as "nice"... To be fair I totally understand why maintainers grow frustrated. Free as free puppies.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 1, 2016 16:08 UTC (Thu) by deater (subscriber, #11746) [Link]

> I think Linus's idea that companies are emotional beasts
> sulk and never talk to you again if you threaten to sue
> them is quite hilarious. Companies don't have memory or
> feelings, the day the threat is over, they will look at what
> is the best way to make profit of the new situation.

I don't know, I was at a major University which decided to sue a famous CPU company over an almost expired out-of-order execution patent. The famous CPU company was very angry and more or less refused any dealings with the University for many many years because of this, to the extent that all of the computing labs were powered by harder-to-source systems with competing-CPU company's chips in them instead.

Yes, anecdote and all, but companies are run by people and people can hold grudges even if companies cannot.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 1, 2016 16:37 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

> I think Linus's idea that companies are emotional beasts sulk and never talk to you again if you threaten to sue them is quite hilarious. Companies don't have memory or feelings, the day the threat is over, they will look at what is the best way to make profit of the new situation.

I don't think that is true at all, the people who make decisions collectively on behalf of the corporation absolutely do so in an emotional way, the individuals don't behave logically and neither does the collective, and they very often put short term emotional gratification over profits. You can find many cases of corporations behaving in an incredibly antagonistic way against their customers, employees or competitors that clearly cause them to make less money, or lose money, based on collective attitude of the decision-makers at the company.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 2, 2016 13:38 UTC (Fri) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (1 responses)

True, the people involved may end up taking their company getting sued personally. Companies are not rational machines. People do incredibly bad decisions for their companies based on bad ideas ("sunk cost" fallacy comes up often...). But that's business - companies doing mistakes go titsup to make space for more savvy companies (or just companies that make different mistakes). But so far the companies that have stopped using Linux due to GPL threats is negligible. Cisco, sued for linksys violations, is platinum member of Linux foundation.

The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

Posted Sep 2, 2016 15:11 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> companies doing mistakes go titsup to make space for more savvy companies

That's only the case for very small companies where they are providing a commodity in a competitive market where the customer has sufficient information to make a rational decision, the first rule of business is to get leverage over the market so that it is not competitive and the consumer does not have information to make a rational decision so that mistakes do not have the same penalties. In addition the timeline between a grievous error and a market correction can be so long that there effectively is no feedback loop, no learning or adjustment happens.