On 03/07/2014 11:49 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
But, that said, the violators that give us the most trouble coming into
compliance are usually wealthy corporations who expend more resources on
skirting their responsibilities than on trying to comply.
I don't get connected with these guys. All of my customers have decided
to comply before they bring me on board.
However, when we talk about the attitudes that /lead/ to infringement,
we should be clear that these attitudes in general do not exist in the
management or legal staff of the company.
The folks with the bad attitudes are /inevitably/ engineers.
Often it's just bad training. They never got show how to combine
software with different licensing. They may been granted 4-year
engineering degree without a single class on copyright and patent
issues. The colleges that do this are behind the times if not
deliberately shirking their duty, since it's not possible for any of
their graduates to operate competently in producing a product that
combines the work of others - and that's pretty much every product today
- without this knowledge.
But it's also bad behavior: I have seen engineers at a major company who
deliberately rigged their system to obscure code so that Black Duck
would not flag issues in it, so that they could get their work done
without the bother of having to resolve them. The management who caught
this were entirely aware of the liability problems it would cause.
And it's often denial: At a customer where I have been engaged in a long
remediation effort, there is /still/ an engineer who angrily dismisses
the idea that they were ever infringing anything. Management and legal
are 100% on board with the program that this engineer rejects.
Thanks
Bruce
