verizon settles over busybox infringement

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, Erik Andersen wrote:

> On Mon Mar 17, 2008 at 07:01:47PM -0400, Paul Fox wrote:
> > in case anyone missed it on slashdot, verizon has settled the
> > suit that rob and erik brought against them for GPL infringement
> > on a router they were distributing (based on busybox).
> >
> > http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206904096&subSection=News
> >
> > since i'm guessing either rob or erik is still on the list, can you
> > tell us anything more?  do we even get a "woohoo, we won another
> > one!" message?  :-)

  an amusing (albeit depressing) side note:  when i read the above, i
forwarded the link to a woman i know who's a mid- to upper-level
manager at a major software company.  she's never had anything good to
say about open-source, but i thought the above story was amusing, so i
passed it on with the notation, "yee ha, the little guys win another
one."  or something to that effect. her response was something like,
"that just shows why no one should use open source."

  when i got that, i was a bit stunned, since it clearly showed that
she thought the very usage of open source would open up her company to
the threat of lawsuits.  my reply, "no, that just shows why no one
should *steal* open source."

  but if this is the attitude out there, then it's no wonder that
companies might be gun shy about incorporating open source into their
architecture.  they're simply, abysmally stupid -- they truly have no
idea what the GPL even *means*.

  that's depressing.  is it too early to start drinking heavily?

rday
--

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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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