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Actual Damages would be the time & effort to review previous patches for vulnerabilities, which is also the motivation for their demands from UMN. That's compli
by lmkg 5y ago
Actual Damages would be the time & effort to review previous patches for vulnerabilities, which is also the motivation for their demands from UMN. That's complicated by the fact that it's unpaid volunteer work, but a bill for the man-hours to evaluate the extent of the mess and clean it up seems like a clear-cut basis for establishing damages.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoHopefully, the Linux Foundation or someone with standing sends the university a bill - if they don't have intrinsic motivation to behave ethically, then the force of the market is a powerful motivation.
- dbcurtis 5y agoI have spent time doing contract development, and also made volunteer contributions to open source projects (not the Linux kernal, though). Certainly, if I were pulled into reviewing UMN kernel patches, I would be tracking my hours at my standard hourly rate, so that I would have the documentation for a claim for actual damages. Cleaning up other people's bad-faith crap is not what open source developers volunteer for. UMN caused real work for real people for bad-faith reasons, and should pay up. The work they caused is deflecting volunteers from otherwise productive activities. I suspect many volunteer kernel developers do contract development to pay the bills -- it should not be hard for them to just create a billing code for UMN clean-up. The Linux foundation can aggregate them all and dump that on UMN. (Also, I have a MSEE from UMN, and I can tell you that the next attempt at fund raising from me is not going to go well for them.)