Bruce Perens wrote:
> 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.
I disagree wholeheartedly. In almost every GPL enforcement matter I deal
with, I spent hours and hours begging them to "please just let's put the
engineers on a conference call with us and sort this out". Management and
lawyers refuse in these cases, and instead stonewall our efforts to explain
to them how their engineers really could easily put together a CCS if we
could just explain to them directly what's needed. [0]
As you say, Bruce, by the time a violator brings you in to help with
compliance, they've already decided they want to do the right thing. There's
a whole group of people -- even some you've worked with before -- who have
decided not to comply, and they likely *don't* call you on purpose, because
they guess that you won't help them in their efforts to "refuse to
comply". :)
[0] This thread inspired to me to start taking track of a specific statistic:
How much time, both in my hours spent working on it and wall-clock time,
is it from the moment I finally get to have a call with engineering to
compliance. My hypothesis based on anecdotal memory is that 80% of the
time in enforcement matters is spent begging to talk to engineering, and
20% is spent actually talking to them to get into compliance. I'll
collect data for a few years and let you know if my hypothesis is
confirmed. :)
-- bkuhn
