The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 16:01 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: The rise of copyright trolls by excors
Parent article: The rise of copyright trolls

> If you wanted to store a non-deleteable source archive instead: It looks like the source provided for a Samsung Galaxy S8 is 185MB, and they might sell around 50 million of them, and flash storage apparently costs something on the order of $0.40/GB, so that'd essentially add up to about $4M. That sounds a lot more expensive than hiring a few lawyers and engineers to find a better solution that doesn't add many cents of cost to every single device.

$4M is substantially less expensive than developing a mobile OS on your own, I'm sure they have received many orders of magnitude more value from the Linux kernel and related open source technology than the costs of license compliance.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 16:25 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Quite ironically $4M is probably orders of magnitude less than what Samsung pays for Microsoft's patent licenses.

The rise of copyright trolls

Posted May 5, 2017 17:35 UTC (Fri) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

By "a better solution" I didn't mean replacing Linux, I meant things like (as a poor example) adding a URL with the source code onto the piece of paper that already has the warranty information, or offering free legal support to resellers of their phones, or whatever they decide is an effective way to comply with the license and avoid copyright trolls. There's surely a solution that scales better than one that increases the manufacturing cost of each device, which is important when working at the tens-of-millions-of-devices scale.

$4M is negligible compared to the total cost of the product, or compared to the value provided by Linux, but that doesn't mean it's not worth saving if you can. $4M here, $4M there, pretty soon you're talking real money.