If you can't trust your developers, you have more than the GPL to worry about. If you think the cost of a GPL violation is bad, just wait and see the results of someone borrowing code claimed by a former employer (or even writing code too similar). Just ask Google where the one thing that has cost them the most pain so far, was a 9 line function that one of their programmers copied into the Android source code..

The GPL is designed to avoid the "What's yours is mine and what's mine is mine" scenario where someone uses the code +their changes to always stay one step ahead of the free version and so the GPL requires that they hand over the full source with any changes they made that were used to build whatever product they shipped. If they made changes to the GPL code that were included in the shipped product, they must publish those changes. On the other hand, if they made changes they did not ship with any product(internal releases etc), they are under no obligation to release those changes.

In this case, they are not shipping all of the changes they made to their source code that was used to build their firmware so that is a clear violation of the GPL.

It's worse than that. Linus would tell everyone not to worry and go on about how Bitkeeper was a great improvement and Larry would prove him wrong by throwing public tantrums and generally playing stupid licensing games. Ex banning IBM from using the free version since they had a competing SCM being built by another (far removed) department. Banning anyone who worked directly on a competing SCM from using Bitkeeper at all. And responding to said developer reverse engineering one of the export interfaces by discontinuing the free version of Bitkeeper.

The best part of it all was that Linus helped him design the thing in the first place.

I'm thinking IBM doesn't use their license anymore. AFIK IBM was only using Bitkeeper for the Linux kernel. Larry made them pay for a license since IBM has it's own competing SCM and the free version banned use by any company that has a competing SCM.

Or you can just use GitHub's Windows client which, the last time I used it required me to use the command line to init non Githib repos but then didn't require the user to use the command line for anything. Might even be better now, it's been a couple of years since I had to support software developers running on windows.,

There is no (usually in the USA) law that says when you give notice, the employer cannot fire you immediately without paying.

Of course, when that happens, you can contact the new employer and ask to start immediately. I worked with someone who was called into the office when he was about to give notice. They laid him off and gave him 6 months severance. You could always apply for unemployment for the time you are fired, though generally there is a 1 week waiting period.

Yeah right. If you were giving notice and you were planning on stealing or sabotaging, would you have not done it already?

I was once laid off. After I was told, I went back to my desk, had some coffee, checked in the code I was working on.

Once I was illegally fired, the company's network had some back doors (not put in by me). If I wanted, I could have wiped every machine in the company, or encrypted the entire hard drive, left them running until all the backups were corrupted, then take them down.

It all depends on the person you hire. If you hire someone who is technically good, if they want they will find a way to burn you. It all depends on the moral fiber of the person.

To be fair I bought a TV a few weeks back from FutureShop because I wanted to compare picture quality myself. In the end, not only was FutureShop cheaper than the local retailers, it was $50 cheaper than Amazon.

Or you could submit the changes and have them merged into the project.

When you are the size of the EC, hiring a few developers to add any needed features becomes cheaper than the software licenses for the proprietary competition.

Any manual that encourages Perl encourages bad code.

Sorry but you are projecting. By all accounts Clarkson was the one spewing verbal abuse. Clarkson knew he was out of line after the indecent and tried to apologize . Here it is from the BBC report "It was not disputed by Jeremy Clarkson or any witness that Oisin Tymon was the victim of an unprovoked physical and verbal attack"

I love Jeremy Clarkson's work on Top Gear but he was really out of line and I really don't see what other option the BBC had but to let him go.

perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'

I really wouldn't. Or at least not now that I'm an adult and have gotten over my teenage anger issues. I may very well tell someone off for name calling or have someone fired but I would not intervene physically unless they either started with physical violence or were doing something to make someone I cared about feel physically in danger (for instance got right in their face/backed them into a corner).

It still wouldn't justify a 20 minute screaming tantrum that disrupted the entire hotel. A proportionate response would be to demand the food be heated or file a complaint. A proportionate response could even be to have someone fired (if it were negligent or malicious)

Even if the guy intentionally put his food in the refrigerator, it would not justify flipping out and yelling for 20 minutes, let alone punching the producer in the face.