3 ms·

Just FYI: This makes total sense. But that’s not how corporate lawyers read it in my experience. I think it’s a) poor legal understanding of software and b) A

by salmo 5y ago

Just FYI: This makes total sense. But that’s not how corporate lawyers read it in my experience. I think it’s a) poor legal understanding of software and b) AGPLv3 signaling litigiousness. And in some regards, even if the lawyer doesn’t fall in A, they know courts may. Their job is risk management. If I submit, they’ll tell me to use a MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0, etc alternative or buy something and suck it up. Also they have a bunch of these to review, plus contracts, etc. so understandably have no time to debate.

pydry 5y ago
Accomodating corporate lawyer intransigence should be solved with them paying you $$$ for a separate license, not picking a different license.
- salmo 5y ago
  That is a totally valid option. That’s a successful model for things like DataStax, RedisLabs, RedHat, and on and on. If you’re wondering how a company makes money just selling open source, this is it. And for the record, I think this is dumb. But I’m describing the reality of what I have to deal with so folks making can understand. There’s 2 basic routes here: 1) offer it for under 1k per seat through a distributor. Then it’s like buying an IDE. You won’t pick up a company-wide deployment, but team by team. 2) Have a commercial offering listed with pricing. Then have sales and legal folks. The sales will be negotiating the price down by volume. The legal will go back and forth on the contract. Companies will require different language based on their requirements and legal culture. It’s not uncommon for them to require OSS indemnification. That can mean absorbing their risk if you don’t own 100% of the code. You’re basically their insurance policy on OSS violations. Also, usually this includes some kind of (often useless) support agreement. Pricing can be tiered by response time (24x7, next business day, and so on.). It’s not a big deal on something non operational like this. For the indemnification, the legal department doesn’t trust their developers (or contract developers) to take a shortcut, not pay attention, or whatever and expose them to a claim.
  - salmo 5y ago
    I should also say, not caring about megacorp adoption is also totally reasonable. If I didn’t build it from scratch and didn’t want to start a company, that’s the route I would go.

by salmo 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

Accomodating corporate lawyer intransigence should be solved with them paying you $$$ for a separate license, not picking a different license.

salmo 5y ago
That is a totally valid option. That’s a successful model for things like DataStax, RedisLabs, RedHat, and on and on. If you’re wondering how a company makes money just selling open source, this is it. And for the record, I think this is dumb. But I’m describing the reality of what I have to deal with so folks making can understand. There’s 2 basic routes here: 1) offer it for under 1k per seat through a distributor. Then it’s like buying an IDE. You won’t pick up a company-wide deployment, but team by team. 2) Have a commercial offering listed with pricing. Then have sales and legal folks. The sales will be negotiating the price down by volume. The legal will go back and forth on the contract. Companies will require different language based on their requirements and legal culture. It’s not uncommon for them to require OSS indemnification. That can mean absorbing their risk if you don’t own 100% of the code. You’re basically their insurance policy on OSS violations. Also, usually this includes some kind of (often useless) support agreement. Pricing can be tiered by response time (24x7, next business day, and so on.). It’s not a big deal on something non operational like this. For the indemnification, the legal department doesn’t trust their developers (or contract developers) to take a shortcut, not pay attention, or whatever and expose them to a claim.
- salmo 5y ago
  I should also say, not caring about megacorp adoption is also totally reasonable. If I didn’t build it from scratch and didn’t want to start a company, that’s the route I would go.