A Working Alternative to FLOSS and IP Risk

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If your business is flush with cash to pay another company to take on what they claim are legal risks that could shut down your business, ActiveState would like to sell you protection from the risks of using Perl, Python, and Tcl.

As an alternative, consider a cheaper approach: respect other people and their work instead of exploiting them.

(One wonders at the cognitive dissonance necessary to build a business around redistributing freely-redistributable software and the desire to market said business by suggesting that it's risky merely to use said software.)

(One also wonders at the bullet point "assurance of no GPL".)

1 Comment

I suspect "assurance of no GPL" is intended to mean "you don't have to open-source your proprietary code". Looking at http://dev.perl.org/licenses/, http://docs.python.org/license.html, and http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/license.html, that appears to be more or less true.

"Eliminates legal fees for license reviews" really means "pay us, we're cheaper than your lawyers". Or "buy your legal opinion off the shelf for less."

I think it comes down to the fundamental businessman's idea that "I want to pay somebody, so if things go wrong, I can sue them". For some people, that's more comfortable than "just don't exploit other people".

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This page contains a single entry by chromatic published on April 11, 2011 4:46 PM.

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