How exactly is this extortion? Mere coercion is not extortion. He's not asking for money, property or services in exchange for all of this -- he just wants the source code (assuming it's rightfully his) to be licensed properly and that the company may not sell it as proprietary.
The fact that he's not asking for money, property or services is neither here nor there. He is asking for something that he perceives to have value and he is threatening to harm his former employer in a fashion outside of the established legal system if they don't give it to him.
There are lots ways this could be tackled that don't require going outside the established legal system. The OP could (and I would argue should):
- Write a polite letter explaining the situation and ask for it to be resolved. - Assuming he hasn't misread his employment contract, offer to license it under commercial terms (essentially creating a fork). - If all else fails, threaten court action.
And to the OP, I say: tread carefully. Not only is there a possibility that your work would be considered "work for hire" (and hence not yours to decide how to license), you should be careful about making threats. Saying things like:
I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation.
To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion. Not only is that not going to win any friends with your former employer (So what if they fired you? For all you know you'll run into the same people again in the future, don't give them a reason to fire you again), publicly announcing this as your intention is a really bad idea when you've just been sacked and are looking for work.
My argument is that five years ago, Apple were making a product which may not have been any better technologically than their rivals but was rather more refined.
Today, the iPad may not be any better technologically than its rivals but it's rather more refined. A lot of people see their computer as some sort of a magic box which is great when it works but frequently doesn't quite do what they want it to - and find the "doesn't quite do what they want it to" bit immensely frustrating. For such people, this refinement is hugely important.
Five years ago, if you wanted a hard-disk based MP3 player with 20GB of capacity, you had one or two choices. The iPod; I believe Toshiba had their own product, as did iRiver.
Price-wise, there wasn't an enormous amount between them. The iPod was slightly dearer, but not a huge amount by any means - maybe £20 or so. The competition was - as a rule:
- Bulkier. - Shipped with much poorer software (be it in the form of firmware and the UI provided by said firmware or in the form of software which you had to install on your PC to load music onto the device).
Today, I think the story's much the same. You can save £10-20 (big f*ing deal) and in exchange you get a device that's bulkier, ships with much worse software and doesn't work as well.
they would only have to capture a small percentage of the hospitality industry to be worth that.
Every time I've seen that argument used, there's an unspoken bit which goes something along the lines of "therefore we don't need to understand our prospective customer - or even define them that closely (because we don't need many), our competition (who cares if they do get 98% of the market as long as we can get our 2%?) or the issues we are likely to face in bringing this product or service to fruition (with such fantastic numbers, so what if it works out a little harder? It won't significantly affect the figures)."
Billion dollar company I have never even heard of. Who says dot-com is dead?
Billion dollar company you have never heard of that isn't making any profit (otherwise they wouldn't be asking VCs for money), that doesn't deal in anything tangible, that owns very little in the way of real assets (Office furniture typically goes for a fraction of its new value at auction; they're using outside companies to host their website and email so they probably don't have much of their own server infrastructure), that adds no real value for their customers and does something that almost anyone could replicate very quickly and cheaply.
A company that is so secure in their billion-dollar valuation that the CEO actually contacted the blogger in question and explicitly said that he was concerned about what that blog entry would do to the valuation of his company.
AFAICT, sounds like an absolutely classic dot-com disaster waiting to happen.
A lot of this is reading between the lines, but if you RTFA, she didn't do any due diligence because she couldn't. Airbnb explicitly demand that all communication takes place through their website - which can make it hard to get someone's email address, phone number and references.
To a lay person, this is more-or-less how traditional letting agents work. The landlord and the tenant aren't even allowed to communicate directly until contracts are signed; either tenant and/or landlord pay the agent a fee and the agent does all the checks before this happens.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
There aren't any salesmen out there selling FOSS, and no slick ads for it on the teevee, so they'll never even know they had alternatives.
Here we go again.
For most practical purposes, they do not have alternatives. Need to do payroll? No such thing on Linux. Need to do accounts? Very little choice, and if your local tax authorities demand you submit online (either through a web browser or using software that's been through some sort of certification process) even less choice. Need to do CAD? Give up now. Need to do anything industry-specific? For most industries, not a chance.
Paying a consultant to write something that will suit can easily cost several times more than buying something off-the-shelf and takes months, that's why most companies rely on off-the-shelf software. You can go from nothing to productive work in a matter of hours.
There is a damn good reason a BSA audit hasn't led to a company publicly dropping proprietary software since 2003; it's got nothing to do with slick salesmen and everything to do with practicality.
I feel sorry for anyone that has to deal with the BSA. My condolences, but you should have chosen software without licensing issues. The idea of keeping track of the sales receipts as well as the licenses themselves is ridiculous. What would they do if you paid cash for the licenses? The source of the license does not matter as long as the license itself is not a forgery.
Every business I've ever worked with keeps every invoice and receipt. You have to, it's the supporting documentation you use to prove that your accounts are accurate.
I would point out that the only example of anyone doing that is Sterling Ball.
Well and good, but that was 8 years ago. You'd think if the BSA was pissing people off enough - and the F/OSS world was truly able to provide an adequate alternative - there would be a more recent example.
When did I say you had to buy a smart car? My own car's a Vauxhall Astra - I believe the US equivalent was the Saturn Astra. (but mine's an older version that never made it to the US). By UK standards, it's astoundingly average - though pretty small by US standards.
Wel, that was the first European version, before they redesigned the second generation to meet US federal regulations. Now it's over 2,000 pounds and costs over $40,000, and it's still operating on a federal waiver.
Seriously: What on Earth are they writing into US regulation that causes this?
And then they can pay me again to switch to TrueCrypt when BitLocker falls off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill:-P
Firstly, as someone else has already said, not everything is based on Windows.
Secondly, I cannot think of a product I should be less inclined to use than TrueCrypt to deal with such a problem. Reason I say this is simple - in every large business you always have the occasional helpdesk call to reset a forgotten password - usually when someone's just come back off holiday. How exactly are you going to deal with the problem when the answer to a helpdesk call for a lost TrueCrypt password is "please send the laptop in for reimaging"?
I think that I'm mostly just annoyed because I had to have the "Yes, there is a reason that isn't 'waste and my incompetence' why a gigabyte of space on the versioned, offsite-replicated, battery-backed, redundant-PSUed, tape-backuped, SAN costs rather more than a gigabyte of space on your USB external hard drive..." chat with somebody the other day...
We've all had that conversation. Usually by the time you've explained all the bits that make it ten or fifteen times dearer per gigabyte, they've decided some time ago "I don't understand, and any time someone tries to blind me with science I assume they're ripping me off".
Why the F do they need Citrix, EVER? What does Citrix do that couldn't be made simpler, cheaper, faster, more robust, and more secure by just not using Citrix...
That's an extremely good question when you consider that Microsoft Windows Server licensing explicitly says that any form of remote desktop you make available for general purpose use, you buy Terminal Server licenses. Even if you're not actually planning to use Terminal Server to deliver that remote desktop solution, you still buy the licenses.
My guess is they've got a contract with a printer company that basically gives them the printer, all the paper and the toner they need over the lifetime of the machine and a number to call which will get an engineer out guaranteed in 8 hours, no matter where the printer is in the country. Typically with such contracts you never own the printer - you pay a fixed price per page and when the printer reaches the end of its useful life the printer company will either charge you to dispose of it or give it to you to dispose of how you wish.
Even then, however, £73 a ream sounds absurd. That comes out at 14p/page, which the last time I looked was about eight or ten times what you should be paying for such a contract on a black & white laser printer. Hell, it's pretty silly for a colour laser printer.
Mono is a failed reimplementation of a useless product.
That is funny, I coulda sworn that my customers put through hundreds of millions of dollars of sales on.net software every year. Hell of a useless product.
The "useless product" bit may be untrue, but I'd be inclined to agree with the "failed reimplementation" bit, if only because I have never yet seen a commercial software firm officially support their product under both.NET and Mono. Usually, the best you'll get is someone saying "It might work - we have no idea. If you get it working, good for you. If you have any trouble - that's your problem."
Oh, it'll be well documented all right. Only the product being documented will be some huge gargantuan beast of a thing that requires hundreds, if not thousands of pages to adequately document. And the documentation will be released 6-12 months after Microsoft release their implementation; the first version of the documentation will be mysteriously different to the implementation and the documentation may never be updated - meaning that by the time anyone else has a hope of having some competition implemented, Microsoft will be well entrenched.
Even so, this would be an improvement over the status quo.
(Disclaimer: I actually rather like Debian, even if the likes of Ubuntu have made it unfashionable)
Knowing the good people behind Debian, it'll be an absurdly over-engineered solution that will only be supported by software in the Debian repository. And it'll be rather poorly documented so figuring out exactly how it's been done will be an exercise in frustration. But once you've figured it out - and provided you're only using packages in the repository - it'll be beautifully elegant and work so nicely you'll wonder why nothing else works the same way.
So if I want to update the OS on my phone - my 7 month old phone that still has 11 months of contract to run before I can get a subsidised replacement - I have to install an unsupported firmware that will blow any warranty out of the water?
I can beat that. Sony Ericsson shipped the XPeria X8 with Android 1.6 some time in about the end of August/beginning of September of last year. It had an upgrade to 2.1 towards the end of November, has had nothing since and Sony Ericsson have announced there will be no further update.
That's just three months - depending on where you are in the world, these phones get released at different times so it could actually work out at more like 2.
The mobile phone industry has never historically issued significant software upgrades once a phone's been released - back in the old pre-smartphone days, firmware would only ever be updated if you took the phone in for service and then you'd be lucky if any update made any noticeable difference. As an industry, none of the major phone manufacturers have ever treated their products as something customers might want to apply software upgrades to over the course of an 18-24 month contract.
Bearing in mind that a number of handset manufacturers are already paying a significant chunk to Microsoft for infringing Microsoft's patents, if Google were obliged to charge handset makers a "patent license fee" for every device they ship (which I can well see being the only practical way of recouping this sort of cost), Android suddenly looks like a very expensive platform.
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To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion.
How exactly is this extortion? Mere coercion is not extortion. He's not asking for money, property or services in exchange for all of this -- he just wants the source code (assuming it's rightfully his) to be licensed properly and that the company may not sell it as proprietary.
The fact that he's not asking for money, property or services is neither here nor there. He is asking for something that he perceives to have value and he is threatening to harm his former employer in a fashion outside of the established legal system if they don't give it to him.
There are lots ways this could be tackled that don't require going outside the established legal system. The OP could (and I would argue should):
- Write a polite letter explaining the situation and ask for it to be resolved.
- Assuming he hasn't misread his employment contract, offer to license it under commercial terms (essentially creating a fork).
- If all else fails, threaten court action.
I not only RTFA, I also read the comments.
And to the OP, I say: tread carefully. Not only is there a possibility that your work would be considered "work for hire" (and hence not yours to decide how to license), you should be careful about making threats. Saying things like:
I’m going to report this to GNU project and warn them that if they don’t bring to code back in-line with the license, that I will send a letter to their customers to make them aware of the situation.
To me, that reads an awful lot like extortion. Not only is that not going to win any friends with your former employer (So what if they fired you? For all you know you'll run into the same people again in the future, don't give them a reason to fire you again), publicly announcing this as your intention is a really bad idea when you've just been sacked and are looking for work.
My argument is that five years ago, Apple were making a product which may not have been any better technologically than their rivals but was rather more refined.
Today, the iPad may not be any better technologically than its rivals but it's rather more refined. A lot of people see their computer as some sort of a magic box which is great when it works but frequently doesn't quite do what they want it to - and find the "doesn't quite do what they want it to" bit immensely frustrating. For such people, this refinement is hugely important.
Five years ago, if you wanted a hard-disk based MP3 player with 20GB of capacity, you had one or two choices. The iPod; I believe Toshiba had their own product, as did iRiver.
Price-wise, there wasn't an enormous amount between them. The iPod was slightly dearer, but not a huge amount by any means - maybe £20 or so. The competition was - as a rule:
- Bulkier.
- Shipped with much poorer software (be it in the form of firmware and the UI provided by said firmware or in the form of software which you had to install on your PC to load music onto the device).
Today, I think the story's much the same. You can save £10-20 (big f*ing deal) and in exchange you get a device that's bulkier, ships with much worse software and doesn't work as well.
they would only have to capture a small percentage of the hospitality industry to be worth that.
Every time I've seen that argument used, there's an unspoken bit which goes something along the lines of "therefore we don't need to understand our prospective customer - or even define them that closely (because we don't need many), our competition (who cares if they do get 98% of the market as long as we can get our 2%?) or the issues we are likely to face in bringing this product or service to fruition (with such fantastic numbers, so what if it works out a little harder? It won't significantly affect the figures)."
Billion dollar company I have never even heard of. Who says dot-com is dead?
Billion dollar company you have never heard of that isn't making any profit (otherwise they wouldn't be asking VCs for money), that doesn't deal in anything tangible, that owns very little in the way of real assets (Office furniture typically goes for a fraction of its new value at auction; they're using outside companies to host their website and email so they probably don't have much of their own server infrastructure), that adds no real value for their customers and does something that almost anyone could replicate very quickly and cheaply.
A company that is so secure in their billion-dollar valuation that the CEO actually contacted the blogger in question and explicitly said that he was concerned about what that blog entry would do to the valuation of his company.
AFAICT, sounds like an absolutely classic dot-com disaster waiting to happen.
A lot of this is reading between the lines, but if you RTFA, she didn't do any due diligence because she couldn't. Airbnb explicitly demand that all communication takes place through their website - which can make it hard to get someone's email address, phone number and references.
To a lay person, this is more-or-less how traditional letting agents work. The landlord and the tenant aren't even allowed to communicate directly until contracts are signed; either tenant and/or landlord pay the agent a fee and the agent does all the checks before this happens.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
In essence, I find it hard to understand what added value AirBNB provides over either Craigslist (pay) or Couch Surfing (free, reputation-based).
They don't, so quite how they managed to get a valuation of $1 billion I have no idea. Are we looking at another dot-com boom?
There aren't any salesmen out there selling FOSS, and no slick ads for it on the teevee, so they'll never even know they had alternatives.
Here we go again.
For most practical purposes, they do not have alternatives. Need to do payroll? No such thing on Linux. Need to do accounts? Very little choice, and if your local tax authorities demand you submit online (either through a web browser or using software that's been through some sort of certification process) even less choice. Need to do CAD? Give up now. Need to do anything industry-specific? For most industries, not a chance.
Paying a consultant to write something that will suit can easily cost several times more than buying something off-the-shelf and takes months, that's why most companies rely on off-the-shelf software. You can go from nothing to productive work in a matter of hours.
There is a damn good reason a BSA audit hasn't led to a company publicly dropping proprietary software since 2003; it's got nothing to do with slick salesmen and everything to do with practicality.
I feel sorry for anyone that has to deal with the BSA. My condolences, but you should have chosen software without licensing issues. The idea of keeping track of the sales receipts as well as the licenses themselves is ridiculous. What would they do if you paid cash for the licenses? The source of the license does not matter as long as the license itself is not a forgery.
Every business I've ever worked with keeps every invoice and receipt. You have to, it's the supporting documentation you use to prove that your accounts are accurate.
I would point out that the only example of anyone doing that is Sterling Ball.
Well and good, but that was 8 years ago. You'd think if the BSA was pissing people off enough - and the F/OSS world was truly able to provide an adequate alternative - there would be a more recent example.
What, ballast? No wonder you're seeing dire mileage.
When did I say you had to buy a smart car? My own car's a Vauxhall Astra - I believe the US equivalent was the Saturn Astra. (but mine's an older version that never made it to the US). By UK standards, it's astoundingly average - though pretty small by US standards.
Wel, that was the first European version, before they redesigned the second generation to meet US federal regulations. Now it's over 2,000 pounds and costs over $40,000, and it's still operating on a federal waiver.
Seriously: What on Earth are they writing into US regulation that causes this?
Or you stop considering 2.6 litre engines to be the smallest anyone should put up with.
My car's got a 1.8 litre engine and by UK standards, that's pretty big. The average is more like 1.6; 1.3 and 1.0 engines are commonplace.
And then they can pay me again to switch to TrueCrypt when BitLocker falls off the Microsoft upgrade treadmill :-P
Firstly, as someone else has already said, not everything is based on Windows.
Secondly, I cannot think of a product I should be less inclined to use than TrueCrypt to deal with such a problem. Reason I say this is simple - in every large business you always have the occasional helpdesk call to reset a forgotten password - usually when someone's just come back off holiday. How exactly are you going to deal with the problem when the answer to a helpdesk call for a lost TrueCrypt password is "please send the laptop in for reimaging"?
I think that I'm mostly just annoyed because I had to have the "Yes, there is a reason that isn't 'waste and my incompetence' why a gigabyte of space on the versioned, offsite-replicated, battery-backed, redundant-PSUed, tape-backuped, SAN costs rather more than a gigabyte of space on your USB external hard drive..." chat with somebody the other day...
We've all had that conversation. Usually by the time you've explained all the bits that make it ten or fifteen times dearer per gigabyte, they've decided some time ago "I don't understand, and any time someone tries to blind me with science I assume they're ripping me off".
Why the F do they need Citrix, EVER? What does Citrix do that couldn't be made simpler, cheaper, faster, more robust, and more secure by just not using Citrix...
That's an extremely good question when you consider that Microsoft Windows Server licensing explicitly says that any form of remote desktop you make available for general purpose use, you buy Terminal Server licenses. Even if you're not actually planning to use Terminal Server to deliver that remote desktop solution, you still buy the licenses.
My guess is they've got a contract with a printer company that basically gives them the printer, all the paper and the toner they need over the lifetime of the machine and a number to call which will get an engineer out guaranteed in 8 hours, no matter where the printer is in the country. Typically with such contracts you never own the printer - you pay a fixed price per page and when the printer reaches the end of its useful life the printer company will either charge you to dispose of it or give it to you to dispose of how you wish.
Even then, however, £73 a ream sounds absurd. That comes out at 14p/page, which the last time I looked was about eight or ten times what you should be paying for such a contract on a black & white laser printer. Hell, it's pretty silly for a colour laser printer.
Mono is a failed reimplementation of a useless product.
That is funny, I coulda sworn that my customers put through hundreds of millions of dollars of sales on .net software every year. Hell of a useless product.
The "useless product" bit may be untrue, but I'd be inclined to agree with the "failed reimplementation" bit, if only because I have never yet seen a commercial software firm officially support their product under both .NET and Mono. Usually, the best you'll get is someone saying "It might work - we have no idea. If you get it working, good for you. If you have any trouble - that's your problem."
Oh, it'll be well documented all right. Only the product being documented will be some huge gargantuan beast of a thing that requires hundreds, if not thousands of pages to adequately document. And the documentation will be released 6-12 months after Microsoft release their implementation; the first version of the documentation will be mysteriously different to the implementation and the documentation may never be updated - meaning that by the time anyone else has a hope of having some competition implemented, Microsoft will be well entrenched.
Even so, this would be an improvement over the status quo.
(Disclaimer: I actually rather like Debian, even if the likes of Ubuntu have made it unfashionable)
Knowing the good people behind Debian, it'll be an absurdly over-engineered solution that will only be supported by software in the Debian repository. And it'll be rather poorly documented so figuring out exactly how it's been done will be an exercise in frustration. But once you've figured it out - and provided you're only using packages in the repository - it'll be beautifully elegant and work so nicely you'll wonder why nothing else works the same way.
So if I want to update the OS on my phone - my 7 month old phone that still has 11 months of contract to run before I can get a subsidised replacement - I have to install an unsupported firmware that will blow any warranty out of the water?
Forget it.
I can beat that. Sony Ericsson shipped the XPeria X8 with Android 1.6 some time in about the end of August/beginning of September of last year. It had an upgrade to 2.1 towards the end of November, has had nothing since and Sony Ericsson have announced there will be no further update.
That's just three months - depending on where you are in the world, these phones get released at different times so it could actually work out at more like 2.
The mobile phone industry has never historically issued significant software upgrades once a phone's been released - back in the old pre-smartphone days, firmware would only ever be updated if you took the phone in for service and then you'd be lucky if any update made any noticeable difference. As an industry, none of the major phone manufacturers have ever treated their products as something customers might want to apply software upgrades to over the course of an 18-24 month contract.
Is it wise to cave, though?
Bearing in mind that a number of handset manufacturers are already paying a significant chunk to Microsoft for infringing Microsoft's patents, if Google were obliged to charge handset makers a "patent license fee" for every device they ship (which I can well see being the only practical way of recouping this sort of cost), Android suddenly looks like a very expensive platform.