Evil ideas

Reinhard Müller reinhard.mueller at bytewise.at
Thu Mar 21 10:17:18 UTC 2002


Am Don, 2002-03-21 um 10.53 schrieb John Peter Tapsell:
> No, no, you both miss my point.  What if the company and employee did it _on puropose_ ?

Ok, now I gotcha. Not only the company but also the employee is evil...

Seriously, I guess the community wouldn't have much of a chance in this
case. However, it bears a high risk for both of them:

1. the copany has to find a programmer that is evil. I don't think such
persons exist ;-)
2. the company risks that the employee changes his mind and uses his
employee rights to keep the product GPL'ed
3. the company risks to get a _very_baaad_ reputation and, what is even
worse, risks to get into arguing with the FSF(E)...
4. the employee also risks to get a bad reputation within the community,
for example to be unable to answer why he doesn't use his employee
rights
5. and finally, both maybe risk that the program will no longer be used.
I could imagine that projects dependent on the evil program would very
quickly write a really free replacement.

Thanks,
-- 
Reinhard Müller                 Tel +43 (5577) 89877-0
BYTEWISE Software GmbH          Fax +43 (5577) 89877-66
A-6890 Lustenau, Enga 2         http://www.bytewise.at
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