Comment by acangiano
15 years ago
I fully agree with you, but their lawyers may not.
Publicly acknowledging his contribution to their commercial success may be ground for a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Yes, he's never going to sue them. Yes, the open source license says that they could use the software for commercial purposes. But large companies get sued all the time, often settling when dealing with lawsuits with even less merit than this one would have. So lawyers may have cautioned the executives against making ceremonies for the engine's developer.
This doesn't mean that it's the best strategy. Lawyers often fail to understand PR issues. In this case, giving the guy credit is the right thing to do in order not to tarnish their image and deal with the issue in a mature manner.
> Publicly acknowledging his contribution to their commercial success may be ground for a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
For abiding by the terms of the license? Unless the law diverges from common sense significantly here (we all know it does, but this is a stretch), there's no grounds for a suit here at all, with or without a nod in his direction. Any attempt would probably be simultaneously (1) rapidly terminated and (2) expensive for the plaintiff.
"Use this how you want, really. If your product makes a significant amount of money, though, and you point out that you use my software, you're at liability to me."
Not buying it. Maybe I'm naive -- and it certainly wouldn't be the first time -- but if that were true I feel like there'd be far less money makers built upon open-source. Wouldn't that pretty much end "powered by Linux"?
Don't get me wrong, I don't dispute that this would be a frivolous lawsuit. I just wanted to mention the possibility that their actions may be guided by overly cautious lawyers.
I'll give you a practical example. If you work for the average software company, you can pretty much use any open source software and redistribute it freely according to the terms of the license. If you work for a company like IBM, there is a few month long process to get an approval by a committee, who will evaluate the license, the code's pedigree, and so on.
Regardless of what the license says, the process is intentionally overly cautious to prevent a random developer from accusing a multi-billion dollar company of using his code.