And thanks for being up front about "privacy NOT guaranteed". Such a statement builds trust for me as an engineer.
The low pricing puts this in range for me if I would do independent software development and outsource part of the work. I would want to make sure I don't pay for development and somebody just copy-pastes some GPL code. That could also spell trouble the day I might want to be acquired by some big player and the problem surfaces in their audit.
I'm passionate about software freedom. I can really see the usefulness of a tool such as this being part of continuous integration to keep developers honest, especially if some part of development is outsourced to big software factories.
But I'm having a hard time convincing project managers etc. about the importance of license compliance. If you can help me with this I might be able to sell in a tool like this.
Indeed. License compliance is something very secretive, the old-styled management does not really want to hear they are using GPL. When the company gets acquired is a shock discovering otherwise. Would be better to understand what GPL is all about, rather than hiding. Last year we had a company in Germany that the acquisition failed because they were not respecting the copyleft licenses.
Would appreciate your help. How can we get in contact? There is a contact form on our website if you wish. Thank you! :-)
What makes me really sad is organizations where management sort of understands, but argues things like:
* we have never cared about this since we started way back and it has worked fine!
* it will cost us time and money, let's ignore it.
* how could someone ever find out?
That said, having a tool that can clearly point to problems could be a big help when management changes and someone sympathetic to uncovering and fixing license issues comes in.
If you are worried that a subcontractor would copy-paste some existing code, I would be more worried that they would reuse code between clients. Just imagine the lawsuit where a for-profit competitor found out that your flagship product has code that they previously bought through the some developer.
Subcontractors should always spell out that some parts of the delivered project will use MIT licenced code, or code licenced to the subcontracting company itself.
Personally, when I do business development and two companies end up co-authoring a library (like say a new plugin), we always specify what parts of the new library are for the company we helped write the plugin, and what parts are "ours".
Sometimes we'll write a bit and say "this is yours, we'll never use it again", and sometimes we'll say "we wrote this, you can use it, but we're free to give it to anyone else too".
And thanks for being up front about "privacy NOT guaranteed". Such a statement builds trust for me as an engineer.
The low pricing puts this in range for me if I would do independent software development and outsource part of the work. I would want to make sure I don't pay for development and somebody just copy-pastes some GPL code. That could also spell trouble the day I might want to be acquired by some big player and the problem surfaces in their audit.
I'm passionate about software freedom. I can really see the usefulness of a tool such as this being part of continuous integration to keep developers honest, especially if some part of development is outsourced to big software factories.
But I'm having a hard time convincing project managers etc. about the importance of license compliance. If you can help me with this I might be able to sell in a tool like this.