Comment by acangiano

15 years ago

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.