Re: The Affero license
tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG) writes:
> Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>
>> Forced publication of in-house development considerably increases the
>> cost of running software.
>
> This is only true when you adopt a "high falutin" concept of
> "publication".
>
> Make a tar file, put it on a web site, a five minute job. Advertise a
> bug-reporting and comments mailing address, and then a reflector on
> that list which says "sorry, but we don't have the time or resources
> to answer your email or even read it." Another five minutes.
That's not sufficient for a modern corporation: you have a duty to the
shareholders to carefully examine all the code before publishing it,
to ensure that no competitive advantage is lost or corporate resource
squandered. You might have proprietary information embedded in the
code (database passwords in your PHP-Nuke modifications, for example)
or sensitive information in comments.
It takes at least a couple of developers to read the entire source
you're about to publish, together with an IP lawyer and somone versed
in the operations of the company available to answer their questions.
When you set up the mailing address, you're advertising it as a way to
contact your company about these issues; I'm not a lawyer, but don't
you have a responsibility to live up to that obligation? Not to
mention the public relations hit from just spewing your code out
there: this community is fickle, and a poorly done release is a great
way to annoy it.
-Brian
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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