Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 23, 2023 23:35 UTC (Thu) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850)
In reply to: Jumping the licensing shark by comex
Parent article: Jumping the licensing shark

> Sure, someone could take some 15-year-old codebase and fork it into a proprietary version, but I'd say that updating that codebase to not only be compatible with modern systems, but be competitive with modern versions of the same codebase and/or replacements in the same space, would almost always require enough development work that it'd be more effective to just rewrite from scratch.

OTOH, it creates an incentive for device manufacturers to use grossly outdated versions of components under such a license. And security issues due to never updated software are already an issue for consumer IoT devices, even if the manufacturer has nothing to gain from using obsolete software (other than of course avoiding the work to release updates).

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 24, 2023 0:36 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Bear in mind the EU is trying to make this illegal. Shipping out-of-date software with known vulnerabilities will get you into big doo-doo if these proposals go through.

Cheers,
Wol

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Apr 16, 2023 9:20 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

While I like the idea of restricting bad actors from gleefully disregarding security concerns, that sounds like a nightmare to legislate without horrendous unintended consequences :-/

At the least, there's the difficulty of defining "security" "known" and just about every other relevant term. Perhaps the more worrying concern from my POV is how to avoid making it essentially impossible to comply without a fleet of lawyers - putting a lot of the "hobbyist" end of the developer spectrum in something of a pickle...

Unfortunately, legislatures in general are crap at considering impact on those who *aren't* giant multinationals. A an example, I would love to try making my own whisky, just for shits and giggles, , but getting the relevant permits explicitly *requires* making a commercial case and is *expensive* :-(