[License-discuss] GPL and proprietary WebAPIs

[John Cowan]

Rick Moen scripsit:

> MySQL AB's sales staff is reputed to have made claims to customers
> that were insupportable.  (Whether that thus constitutes a licensing
> strategy I would not know, but I'm generally not quite that cynical.)

Maybe not, but lying to your customers is definitely a *business*
strategy.  Whether or not MySQL AB employed it, my first employer
certainly did.  Their salesmen were told to say the software could do
anything the customer asked for, and the programmers (including me) had
the job of cashing out these promises, however extravagant.

I eventually got sick of this and left, whereupon some enterprising
person issued a post-final paycheck in my name and forged my signature
to it.  Shortly after, the company collapsed.  Four equally bogus
companies later, the principals finally found themselves under arrest.

> Which is mostly just a case in point about why a businessman who talks
> directly to salesman and believes what they say without investigation
> has a fool for a negotiator.

*shrug*   Unbiased advice is always hard to come by.

-- 
John Cowan  <cowan at ccil.org>  http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.
                --Albert Einstein