Novell and SuSE

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Author: der.hans
Date:  
Subject: Novell and SuSE
Am 17. Jan, 2004 schw=E4tzte Trent Shipley so:

> If a CIO the YAST license wouldn't bother me one little bit -- remember a=

lmost
> everyone *uses* software. A good CIO buys software and tries hard not to
> write software. As a CIO you do not want to waste time reading GPL code =

--
> you *don't care* if you cand read the source code, if you have employees
> reading source code then you've already done something incompetent.


I disagree with this as a blanket statement. It depends on the company and
business needs. At Motorola our engineers certainly should have been readin=
g
code :). That often included proprietary code that Mot had purchased.

Lets say, though, that it's for a company that generally wouldn't be
reading/writing code as part of what it's selling. There still might be
times that having employees or consultants reading code is a business need.
Maybe doing a code review for security reasons. Maybe fixing a bug that
isn't otherwise getting fixed. I certainly have wished we could pay someone
to fix proprietary code on more than one occasion ( and at least once the
proprietary code belonged to the company I was working at ).

There's also the case where the company could be giving back to the
community from which it's gotten all this great software ;-).

I understand what you're trying to say, but just like 'outsourcing',
sometimes it makes business sense, sometimes it doesn't.

ciao,

der.hans
--=20
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