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If I had a dime for every time a big company I've worked at has investigated the licenses of the software it uses, I'd have fifty cents. People tend to forget
by peterwwillis 6y ago
If I had a dime for every time a big company I've worked at has investigated the licenses of the software it uses, I'd have fifty cents.
People tend to forget that big companies are really just collections of normal people who are not lawyers and don't even think about licenses. If 5 levels of managers haven't all been explicitly instructed to read random software licenses or they're fired, the engineer's not gonna do it unless they feel like it, and most don't feel like it. It mostly only comes up when legal goes out of their way to make a stink about it, and they're not just continuously demanding license information.
- azeirah 6y agoI did an internship at Bosch a while ago, and I can say they take software licenses very seriously.
- snazz 6y agoGoogle takes licenses very seriously as well: https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-not-allowed https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-no... They certainly have a lot of eyes on them, so any mistake with licenses could be very costly.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoI worked for an insurance data provider, and as part of our server upgrade, the legal team requested licenses for all of software dependencies. It was a bit of shell-scripting around conda env list, but it certainly wasn't completely trivial to do.