I seriously can't believe how short sighted people can be. That's bad business.
I worked at a big bank too, you'd think they would understand about investment? No. They simply leeched off open source in the same way.
I worked at a big bank too, you'd think they would understand about investment? No. They simply leeched off open source in the same way.
Don't get me won't, I'm not happy about the state of affairs, but banks are usually pretty risk averse (or more accurately, their risk portfolio is catastrophe averse). If an org like a bank doesn't care it seems like a sign that open source either needs some better teeth or it needs to accept that its role in the ecosystem is changing. We might see some short term success calling out bad actors but if there's enough of them to put on a whole play then it seems more useful to focus on why they're all able to book a theatre so easily.
I mean the open source project suddenly being abandoned due to lack of a corporate sponsor would be pretty catastrophic, no?
What struck me the most is that at its heart the bank has these sorts of provisions in its constitution, ie giving back to the community and being in harmony with the environment and being relationship oriented.
It's like the lion not rewarding the mouse in that old fable, due to brand having been subverted by petty bureaucracy and middling management.
I doubt they'd have started using it in the first place if the software looked like it would be abandoned.
If the best 'teeth' open source has is, "we might stop developing this at some point in the future if you don't give us $ for using our work", then as the parent said open source needs better teeth.
And as I mentioned in my parable the lion didn't need the mouse to bite it in order to do the right thing you know what I'm saying?
In other words a 150 year+ institution should just know better and it's a shame to think they've been sucking the world dry for that long without a second thought as to how it might affect their own bottom line.
I always wondered what would happen if some developers used some GPL lib and shipped to customers and it was noticed and caused the company to be sued. Would all the developers be fired on the spot and the software undone?
In a lot of commercial code there is almost literally nothing worth protecting, just sunk-cost. If a finite element package got open sourced, that would be a minor disaster (although even then you're paying for the UX and support not the code) but things like firmware are barely worth the electrons on the drive.
The point being the business impact would probably be fairly minor for most projects.
(It is at this point that I realize that maybe one of the reason that HFT people like arcane formal-proof languages so much—besides just verifying that they won't lose money—is that the ecosystems of unusual languages are smaller, so it's less likely that any problem has a solution involving third-party code, and therefore there's less concern about IP contamination.)
For any sizable software that has been alive for 10 years. There is no way it's safe to open source the repo.
They don't have to release code and the licensed software's owners don't have their rights violated any further
Of course, IANAL