Am I alone here in thinking how troubling this is? Many products are started for a few hundred dollars by people just getting started in programming. Financiall

Am I alone here in thinking how troubling this is? Many products are started for a few hundred dollars by people just getting started in programming. Financially punishing them does not solve this problem because they just fold up and shut down, leaving only the more wealthier organizations, which, of course, kills innovation. The other day, FEMA (a US Gov agency, for your foreign to that term) put out a contract where they want to hire an organization to help it with social media distribution of news, and one of those networks was Twitter. Think of that -- a massive government institution receiving millions every year, depending on code that is relatively simple in concept. Twitter was started on a prayer and a song. The idea of Twitter is one I cannot say a behemoth like Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Cisco, etc. would have created out of the blue. They don't think in these terms unfortunately, but boy don't they run to these companies to use them or to buy them up when they have a major "we should have built that" moment, don't they? If SANS/Mitre reviewed Twitter in its infancy and filed a lawsuit against it for security flaws, or if we web developers have to fear a class action suit every time we code something, then things like Twitter would never happen. Instead, organizations like this would better spend their dollars working on education of the developer community on building secure, bug-free apps, where support is possible. This is one of the reasons why the GPL is fantastic. You can still make a profit from your software, yet the code is freely visible, can be changed and upgraded, and most often is community-supported and outstanding. When more developers can see the code, all bugs are shallow. Although this is changing in the past 6 years with companies like IBM and Novell taking the lead, the GPL is something that usually most behemoth software companies do not want for their code. So think of that, if lawsuits stifle innovation such that only the big behemoth companies are who we turn to, then this most often means proprietary code you cannot see, cannot fork, and cannot have widespread community-support for where code can be altered or improved. And that makes the problem worse.