I find that limiting a companies usage of available tools based on policy decision is a bad business decision. Industries that have plenty of competition tend to discard of such attitudes, since there will always be someone willing to save money whenever possible.
Take games. While a game will likely not use GPL in the product since it would conflict with the basic model of selling licenses of copyrighted content, even a large industry actor like blizzard will use LGPL in their flagship products (like starcraft 2) if it saves them developer time. They don't seem very upset, or a failure, to have to distribute source code of those parts. It seems a very legitimate business decision to make decision based on increasing revenue and decreasing costs, and a illegitimate business decision to increase costs because for fear of "licenses" when it does not conflict with their revenue flow.
I would claim there is some good arguments (which people may or may not agree with) that any like or dislikes that companies has that is not PR based or revenue/cost based is illegitimate business decision that a market economy should replace.
I find that limiting a companies usage of available tools based on policy decision is a bad business decision.
Oh, I completely agree with that. I'll never forget a particularly frustrating conversation with a client who refused to allow access to their database, because we were using 'open source code that anybody could have changed'. That sort of thing – banning open-source software from your systems – is silly.
However, you've got to consider the default-conservative attitude of larger companies. In Apple's case for example, the breaking point seems to have been GPLv3 - this was when they started reimplementing things like Samba and removing copylefted software. And that's because the GPLv3 represents a real business risk – aside from the direct patent implications, litigation under it is sparse, and businesses don't like operating in unsure legal territory!
A lot of FSF advocates don't realize how toxic the GPL has become outside of the FSF bubble. GPLv3 software in particular is a now non-starter for a lot of companies and has undermined a lot the goodwill businesses had towards GPL software.
The shift towards BSD, Apache, and other open source licenses is a symptom of that and unless the FSF wises up, support for GPLv3 projects will dry up.
I would guess that these companies never had actual "goodwill" towards GPL software and the Free Software community. Instead their motivation was simple profit and they weren't interested in anything that might interfere with that, such as freedom for their users, which GPLv3 enhances (specifically via the anti-Tivoisation provisions).
A company that seeks to maximize revenue and minimize cost would then do a cost analysis on that risk, and determine how much money it is worth. Risk, be that of lawsuits, fire or meteors, if you spend money on it it need to be legitimized by doing the math and showing how much money a company would expect to loose by distributing gplv3 instead of gplv2.
I would very much like to see such calculations so the market could evaluate if it is correct. Maybe see what a insurance company would ask in return for covering it, as that is their domain of expertise. So far there has not to my knowledge been a single lawsuit over GPLv3 specific requirements, which is something I think a insurance company would consider. Good money with a risk that has never ever occurred is something they might like in a deal.
I would claim there is some good arguments (which people may or may not agree with) that any like or dislikes that companies has that is not PR based or revenue/cost based is illegitimate business decision that a market economy should replace.
That's a nice summary.
Been thinking lately about "business bugs". As technology developers, we're all familiar with technology bugs: system crashes, system runs too slow, system does something unexpected.
It occurs to me that there are business bugs as well. Business takes too long, business solves the wrong problem, and so on.
Perhaps the entire raison d'être of Lean Startup is to apply ATDD at the business execution level.
Take games. While a game will likely not use GPL in the product since it would conflict with the basic model of selling licenses of copyrighted content, even a large industry actor like blizzard will use LGPL in their flagship products (like starcraft 2) if it saves them developer time. They don't seem very upset, or a failure, to have to distribute source code of those parts. It seems a very legitimate business decision to make decision based on increasing revenue and decreasing costs, and a illegitimate business decision to increase costs because for fear of "licenses" when it does not conflict with their revenue flow.
I would claim there is some good arguments (which people may or may not agree with) that any like or dislikes that companies has that is not PR based or revenue/cost based is illegitimate business decision that a market economy should replace.