verizon settles over busybox infringement

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Wednesday 19 March 2008 19:24, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Erik Andersen wrote:
> > On Mon Mar 17, 2008 at 07:01:47PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
> > > in case anyone missed it on slashdot, verizon has settled the
> > > suit that rob and erik brought against them for GPL infringement
> > > on a router they were distributing (based on busybox).
> > >
> > > http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206904096&subSection=News
> > >
> > > since i'm guessing either rob or erik is still on the list, can you
> > > tell us anything more?  do we even get a "woohoo, we won another
> > > one!" message?  :-)
> 
>   an amusing (albeit depressing) side note:  when i read the above, i
> forwarded the link to a woman i know who's a mid- to upper-level
> manager at a major software company. 

I'd say, statistically, woman + manager => no chance to understand
what we (open source crowd) are doing, and why.

> she's never had anything good to 
> say about open-source, but i thought the above story was amusing, so i
> passed it on with the notation, "yee ha, the little guys win another
> one."  or something to that effect. her response was something like,
> "that just shows why no one should use open source."
> 
>   when i got that, i was a bit stunned, since it clearly showed that
> she thought the very usage of open source would open up her company to
> the threat of lawsuits.  my reply, "no, that just shows why no one
> should *steal* open source."
> 
>   but if this is the attitude out there, then it's no wonder that
> companies might be gun shy about incorporating open source into their
> architecture.  they're simply, abysmally stupid -- they truly have no
> idea what the GPL even *means*.

Ehhh. When company grows, it gets economies of scale, yadda yadda,
but at the same time manager-esque people tend to scale the ladder
faster than techies. Not because they are evil, but because they
think about their career growth much more hours per day than techies.
Techies are busy tinkering with code!

It happens ever so slowly that techies do not really notice until it
becomes too late. Then you see painfully familiar picture: lower ranks
of staff are techies which have little/no say in deciding what to do
and how to develop the software, and managers who do not know well enough
what software development IS. In one of my previous jobs, managers
uniformly were just MS Windows users. How in hell they are supposed
to tell sound technical idea from complete rubbish?
--
vda