[conspire] external storage recommendation

[Nick Moffitt]

On 25Sep2021 07:03pm (-0700), Rick Moen wrote:
> Which is cheeky, transparent, insultingly obvious corporate bullshit.
> What they really mean is that they're taking an educated guess that the
> Linux kernel copyright stakeholders will not give a damn sufficient to
> bring copyright infringment against them and extract damages.

And yet this is kind of the way of civil litigation, no?  I did a licence review at the actual FSF in Temple Place, and found some code in something we were hoping to release with the FSF's name on it.  And as is the case with the software we all tended to rely on, we'd find stuff from the 70s and 80s that was kind of unclear and had copyright statements on it that to which we couldn't find corresponding grants of licence.

And the answer was "what is the risk here?"  In nearly all of them it was the better part of absolutely nothing at all: the whole Internet had been passing around and modifying this code since before the Usenet Great Renaming, and nobody had asserted their rights against anyone in all that time.  While it would have been good to get an explicit clearly-delineated waterfall of permissions, there is also something to be said for "everyone is getting away with this, the authors shared it in the spirit of collaboration and use, and who's really going to sue us anyway?"  

And in the case of Ubuntu, it so far seems to have borne out.  We shall see, though, I suppose!

Another fun thing from that licence audit was that I found code claiming to be in the Public Domain as part of the old pre-gzip Compress library.  It had a date on it from before the Berne Convention was penned (let alone the USA's membership in same), and to this day remains the only bit of code I've ever used that I am reasonably confident is literally without copyright.