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Indemnity Protection for Linux?
spookymonster asks: "I'm a mainframe sysadmin for a Fortune 50 company. I'm also a Linux hobbyist. About 18 months ago, my request for a proof-of-concept z/Series testbed was granted, and the results have been encouraging. Despite this, senior management keeps saying that Linux isn't ready for prime time. Today, I was finally able to corner one of them and ask him what exactly his issue was with Linux. His answer: Indemnity. All our other software vendors provide protection against someone suing us for using their product. Who protects us if a third party sues us, claiming Linux infringes on their copyrights? Sadly, I was at a loss for words. I've done some digging on Google, but haven't really found anything on the subject. With the SCO/IBM lawsuit heavy in the headlines of late, I figured I'd turn to the Slashdot community for answers. How do I respond to questions about Linux and indemnification protection?"
It's really a good question, and I have no answer
/. is US-centric, but
for you, I'm sorry.
But I want to extend the question on BSD Unix, i.e.
OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD.
Also I want to remind you that
the world is more than USA. I'm, for example,
under European law.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Buy it from a vendor.
Perhaps none of them will offer the level of indemnity that you require, but if you ask enough of them, it may convince one of them that this might be a viable business model, and start offering it in the future. Essentially you'll be paying for insurance rather than software, so this would be an interesting new way for making money from open source.
Just look at the the MSSQL ruling posted to slashdot not to long ago. MS left some of their customers out to dry to pay royalty fees to a third party because MS's license didn't allow customers to use it.
Stupid things kids do.
Maybe. Or he might really have made a calculated business decision about it. (To check, ask him the terms and sizes of indemnity protection that they require. If he knows, then he might be serious.)
But to my mind, the most likely explanation is typical large-company cover-your-ass behavior. Large companies typically punish for failure more strongly than the reward success. One way to deal with this is to always have somebody else available to blame in case of failure.
I'm a freelance consultant; last year I did some work for a fortune 50 company. They offered me a job, but I said, "No, I'd like to stick with my freelancing ways." To get me in, I had to be on the list of approved vendors; I ended up having to subcontract through one of them. When I asked why they couldn't just contract with me directly like everybody else, they said that their vendors had to have deep pockets, so that they could sue them if something went wrong.
This was, of course, ridiculous: they didn't require their employees to have deep pockets, and when they screwed up, they didn't sue them for millions. (If anything, they promoted them.) But they weren't budging, so I charged them enough extra to pay for the middleman and forgot about it.
Few people, even business directors, have the legal knowledge to understand licensing issues. It sounds like this guy is just trying to throw out legal jargon so that you cannot argue the points technically. It is an avoidance technique.
Gonna have to post this one anonymously! And perhaps I will obfusticate the name of a large software and hardware company....
Our business was about to fold because HAL sold us wares that simply did not do what they promised us it would.
HAL's attitude was "oh well, sorry about that!"
So, the biggest weasel PHB in the company got an HAL big wheel on the phone, and after about a half an hour got said big wheel to ADMIT that HAL had knowingly sold us software that was broken and could not do what they said it would do.
Then, weasel-boy took the SECRET TAPE RECORDING he'd made of that conversation, which mentions dates, places, products, test results, etc. and duplicated it a half-dozen or so times. He sent one copy to HAL and escrowed the rest in various places.
HAL bought back all our stuff at the cost we paid for it AND gave us a $4 million mainframe installation, and all the incriminating tapes were destroyed.
They weren't worried about the legal issues. Your lawyer is full of shit, no software company is legally liable for your losses under any circumstances (barring outright egregious and repeated fraud, and maybe not even then - we'll see how the MS-SQL case works out).
What they were worried about was the PR that we were going to generate when we published transcripts in the New York Times. Sure, they'd sue us and win, but so what - the company'd be out of business anyway.
Sometimes even weasel PHBs have their uses!