Jumping the licensing shark

Posted May 4, 2023 11:08 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Jumping the licensing shark by farnz
Parent article: Jumping the licensing shark

The enforcement needs to be there, otherwise you are punishing the "GoodCorps" and giving an advantage to the "BadCorps" ( https://paul.jakma.org/2009/12/21/killing-free-software-w... ) - and further, the penalties in enforcement need to be sufficient for BadCorp to change its ways.

If BadCorp only has to pay /costs/ of some poor Free Software dev or para-legal every now and then, while reaping the benefits of in lower R&D and licensing of exploiting Free Software (which could easily be many millions - licensing a proprietary embedded OS need not be cheap say) and ignoring the licensing obligations, then BadCorp's economic incentives are obvious.

Are we for the BadCorps?

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted May 4, 2023 11:28 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> The enforcement needs to be there, otherwise you are punishing the "GoodCorps" and giving an advantage to the "BadCorps" ( https://paul.jakma.org/2009/12/21/killing-free-software-w... ) - and further, the penalties in enforcement need to be sufficient for BadCorp to change its ways.

Yep, exactly. And the penalties need to be _very_ large in order for it to make a dent in BadCorp's bottom line.

Unfortunately, with said very large penalties on the line, it's going to take years of very expensive lawyering to get to the point where you might eventually collect.