Subcontractors, Meet Open Source

“Now that the recent lawsuit against Verizon by a couple of open
source developers has been settled, it’s become clear–as some
people suspected–that the real offender here wasn’t Verizon per se
but a subcontractor, Actiontec. I wonder if this will mean a new
level scrutiny or contractual stipulations for the way
subcontractors are hired to do this kind of work–with one of the
possible stipulations being ‘no open source,’ especially if
litigation is a serious risk.

“In the abstract, it’s not hard to avoid getting sued by the
authors of an open source product for violating the GPL–you just
have to follow the rules and provide the source code for whatever
you’ve been using…”

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