The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code

Re:The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code by Verdex on Monday November 23, 2020 @10:52AM (#25188027)

This is a good point, but I think there are some unfortunate side effects. Once you give away free stuff because you used someone's (open sourced) code, now you have to get the PR people involved. In the future if your devs see some other open sourced code that they want to use, now instead of needing to get legal on board they also need to get PR on board.

"Oh, hm, well we don't really want to give away free consoles this time around. And if we don't then it will make us look bad because we did last time. So don't use that code."

As a dev, I don't really want to have to check with 50 other divisions in the company before I use some open sourced stuff. And then get denied because of some unrelated PR event is going on.

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Re:The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code by ghaff on Monday November 23, 2020 @11:35AM (#25188513)

I generally agree with this school of thought. Acknowledgement whether necessary or not is just a nice gesture and it would be great if more companies did it with the open source code they are (presumably) using in line with the license.

But, as soon as you start paying, you have: 1.) All the other open source code they're presumably using possibly in more trivial ways and 2.) As soon as money enters the question it can become a matter of "My library probably saved Nintendo tens of thousands of dollars in development costs and all I got is this lousy console. No wonder people say open source development isn't sustainable." (Whether that was the case here or not.) It might have been a nice gesture but it could easily be taken the wrong way.

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