On 19 May 2006, at 09:16, Wesley Parish wrote:
Three - there is usually a group of people willing to
do this sort
of work -
voluntarily - as the Groklaw example shows us, so it's often more
an inertia
thingee than anything more serious.
I think this is off topic now, but the issue is that the company that
signed the license agreements is the entity that is liable to be
sued. So it is their responsibility to ensure that they are safe
from that. That pretty much means it will cost them money, because
*their* engineers and legal people will have to check things, and
demonstrate to the satisfaction of the officers of the company (who
carry the can if they get sued) that it's OK.
This doesn't mean it can't happen (as said in another branch of this,
people within Sun have tried it before) but it does mean it's
competing with other stuff for resource. Would Sun (say) improve
their chances of survival by to open source SunOS 4 (which, although
people romanticise it now, actually sucked, even at the time - it was
only being better than early SunOS 5 and being a long time ago that
make it seem nice) or to open source Java? Or by doing neither?
Sorry for the rant, I'll shut up now.
--tim