... or free software issues in particular. The question was triggered by someone whose management is scared silly of the GPL, for whatever spurious reasons. My answers assume that legal and technical facts won't work without answering the subjective business-sense issues attached.
What sort of things have you had to do to get reluctant management to let you contribute patches back to free software?
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: 9 August 2010 22:50 Subject: Re: [ORG-discuss] GPL Advice To: Open Rights Group open discussion list org-discuss@lists.openrightsgroup.org
On 9 August 2010 21:12, Will Hall org@gnatter.net wrote:
Whilst the spirit of GPL/copy[right|left|fight] issues is clear (ish), the intricacies are not, and I would very much appreciate some help with my basic understanding.
I replied from my experience, and (despite being somewhat off topic for ORG) it may be of benefit to others here in a similar boat .
In my experience, you need to point out the business advantage: we got a bunch of our build process working *far* better by contributing a fix we needed to the build software, and one of our staff, who is actually a medical doctor, has found himself a significant contributor to a GPL project!
That is: focus on the carrot, to the point they consider it attractive enough to see problems as things to work around. And GPL compliance is ridiculously easy *once you have* management buyin.
The "competitive advantage" is "free vendor assistance, they like us so will tend to help us." They might respond to that.
It can also be good marketing and public relations. Get the marketers interested, that'll swing it ;-)
[I might forward this to FSFE for ideas too.]
- d.