[LINK] Open source - is it a risk for your business?

[Richard Chirgwin]

Comedy - is it a risk for a lawyer's credibility?

Really, Silicon.com could have known better.

Eg:
>
> However, most forms of OSS licences are structured in favour of the 
> contributor rather than the licensee.
>
Most forms of proprietary license are structured in favour of the vendor 
rather than the licensee.

> There are usually no contractual commitments of quality or fitness for 
> purpose.
>
As there are none for proprietary.
>
> The licensee will have to bear the risk of any errors in the code, and 
> since there are often many contributors at work, there are numerous 
> opportunities for infringing code to be introduced.
>
Note that this point begins with "errors" and ends with "infringing"...

> This may, in some cases, outweigh the time and cost advantages of 
> using open source.
>
The purchase of a bad database at Canterbury Hospital in Sydney some 
years back outweighed the time and cost advantages of the new product...

> OSS licences contain very few (if any) of the warranties that might 
> generally be included in proprietary software. For example, those 
> relating to the suitability of the software for a particular use, 
> meeting a particular specification or being developed to a particular 
> standard of care.
"might generally be included in proprietary software"? Planet Earth 
calls; proprietary software does not contain warranties, it contains 
disclaimers.

> One significant limitation is that once the OSS has been modified, the 
> licensee is usually obliged to put these modifications back into the 
> open source community.
One of the boilerplate scare-stories. You are obliged to publish what 
you distribute; do not distribute a modification, and you are not 
obliged to publish the source code. When a lawyer lies through his 
t^h^h^h^h^h^h^h garbles his facts, you have to wonder about his fitness 
to give legal advice...

> If the OSS user does not license his own code under the terms of the 
> open source licence, he has no right to use the software.
Again, wrong. If the OSS user distributes code under a more restrictive 
license, then depending on the choice of OSS license, h may lose the 
right to use the original software ...

But that's enough. All of the points of OSS get trotted out, 
for-and-against, and I have seen no evidence that anything as mundane as 
a fact has ever changed anyone's mind.

What's more depressing is the utter debasement of the editorial role as 
evidenced by any editor commissioning and publishing this stream of 
nonsense. Facts, dudes, check the facts.

RC



Deus Ex Machina wrote:
> Open source - is it a risk for your business?
> http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39161867,00.htm
>
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