What about dual licensing? (Score 1)

Hi!
I have seen others say "leave your job" because they are morons. This would be the easy way, but we IT people sometimes love to fight for our views. So try this before you go to the HR dept or look for job ads.

Large enterprises are scared of things with unknown or hard to track origins. Open source software is such a thing. They might be afraid of being sued, by some guy who claims to have 5 lines of code stolen and used by the company as part of an open source. This can be a real problem, especially if a scandal breaks out and if the company is publicly listed, this can easily cost millions (and the decision makers career). I think this is one of the causes of paranoia.

Have you tried to bring in open source that comes with dual licensing? We do dual licensing, because we have found that companies like the hybrid approach of having an open source software but at the same time having a legally safe license. In this case, some of the cutomers' legal dept does not even know that the software is open source, because they do not read the GPL, but the commercial license. The commercial license has a clause with idemnifies (i think this is teh right term) the user, so if someone sues the user for copyright infringment, we take the blame. (Note: i am not a lawyer, but i did talk a lot to lawyers and picked some of the language up :-) )

Of course, not all open source can be dual licensed, because only the copyright holder can license the code, so if the code is owned by many people, not one entity, this can not be done. In our case, the code is owned by our company (because we wrote it) and for the parts tha we did not write, we use trusted sources. This way we can take the responsibility for our code, and we can also license the code with a proprietary license (as well as GPL).

You should try this dual licensing first, and later convince your bosses that if this worked, other code could work. Choose foss with a company behind it, so you get support and updates, and there is some entity you can make a contract with.

Short background:I work for a software company of 40 that produces open source ECM software and sells licenses and services to large enterprises in Hungary. Our software runs on Windows, so I quite know the problem of "wtf, foss on windows?", I can even imagine the look on your bosses face.

Tom