SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the sign-me-up-for-the-next-hermit-convention dept.
The nation's nerds woke up in a utopia this morning, one where everyone stays inside, sporting events are being canceled, and all social interaction is forbidden.
All types of nerds, from social introverts to hardcore PC gamers, welcomed the dawn of this new era, privately from their own homes.
"I have been waiting my whole life for this moment," said Ned Pendleton, 32 -- via text message, of course -- as he fired up League of Legends on his beefy gaming PC. "They told me to take up a sport and that the kids playing basketball and stuff were gonna be way more successful than us nerds who played Counter-Strike at LAN parties every weekend."
Always look on the bright side of life.
[Certainly an element of gallows humor, but it does offer a different perspective from the incessant drumbeat of gloom and doom surrounding the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. What "positives" have you seen? --martyb]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:48AM (2 children)
There's two types of "open source guy".
The first used the GPL, and companies have to follow the terms and keep the code open. Companies often don't go after GPL3 code because of the requirements that devices sold that use it have to allow the user to be able to modify the affected portions on the device. Companies have to go through hoops and you can still profit off of their work. There's a lot of software with millions and millions of dollars of commercial funding poured into them, but you can freely take advantage of that without issue.
Sometimes, commercial source licenses are sold so the author can profit directly off of corporate interest.
The second used the BSD or MIT or some hilariously permissive license, and now his code is embedded in someone else's product making a company millions, and they get absolutely dick-all from it. The target hardware is shut tight, no code is released, no money comes your way. They can take, and take, and give absolutely nothing back.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 15 2020, @04:34PM
A person I worked on a recent startup with was a senior Googler who was in charge of some decent sized projects at the company. He also held a upper managerial position at Amazon, got to recount some interesting stories about meetings with Bezos. He was a pretty mediocre coder. That kind of surprised me but not really all that much. His code was at least passable, but his networking and schmoozing game was 10/10 - and what really matters when advancing that corporate ladder?
Ah, the point? We started getting into licensing discussions for the product. He and his decades of FAANG experience had no clue that code that did not have a license could not simply be copied and used as you see fit. For those who don't know, code that does not have a license is by default copyrighted and owned by the creator - copying it is illegal. I have 0 doubt that not only has plenty of unlicensed code made it into these companies private projects, but also likely code that was GPL'd. Clearly at these companies legal rights usage was not a high priority training topic.
We tend to imagine the companies would never take this risk because the risk:reward sucks. That's maybe true from a company perspective. I say maybe because they'd get any claim knocked down to a pittance in court, if somehow it could be proven. But beyond this, companies are made up of individuals - now a days hundreds of thousands of individuals. There's an *extremely* non-zero percent of these folks borrowing liberally from code that shouldn't. Thinking your rights are protected when you put your code out in the wild is just naive. There's some coder slightly obfuscating your code and claiming it as his own out there. You get nothing, he gets accolades. Isn't open source awesome?
I actually respect the BSD/MIT/NoLicense types more because of this. They at least understand the sacrifice you make when putting code out there.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Sunday March 15 2020, @05:11PM
That's an interesting perspective. I've worked on both sorts of projects. BSD / MIT licensed code that I've written has ended up in a bunch of places, but it's also made me money when companies want to hire a contractor to work on it and look for people already familiar with the code. In some cases, they've paid me to write from-scratch replacements for GPL'd programs to permissively license, because it's cheaper than paying the lawyers to deal with the GPL (if they get some third-party contributors to the permissively licensed alternative, that's free code, if they don't then it's no loss to them). In contrast, I've seen companies take GPL'd code that I've written and assigned copyright for to the FSF and use it in violation of the license, but the FSF hasn't bothered to take them to court because they didn't think they could win and it's expensive. I've also seen companies take GPL'd code and not contribute back because they didn't want to publicly admit that they were using it internally (even though they were fully in compliance with the license), just in case they opened themselves up to liability.
sudo mod me up