Hi Bruce,
On 09/03/2014 02:48, Bruce Perens wrote:
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.
Whilst I certainly agree that there are a lot of engineers who do not
understand these issues and very much agree that universities fall short
in this area, I'm not convinced the problem is restricted to engineers.
On one project I've worked on, the company I worked for was
subcontracted to build a particular linux device.
The engineers developed the product, and included in the deliverables
given to the customer was a tgz with all the source code necessary for
GPL compliance (which correctly excluded the proprietary application),
along with instructions on how to publish this to comply with the GPL,
what to put in the documentation, why this was necessary, etc.
The management at the customer outright stated they would not be
publishing the source code. Their argument was essentially "we've paid
for this, we don't want our competitors to be able to get it". (It was
explained several different ways that this wasn't optional if they
wanted to use linux etc, but it made no difference.)
Joseph
