Re:Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
by ianstallings on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @12:50PM
(#6361252)
I've said the same in the past and usually it's to the business managers or executives. Too often they are willing to conveniently overlook licensing or service restrictions in order to get what they want or need.
A specific example - I had to convince executives that we needed to pay MPEG LA because we were using FFMPEG to encode and decode using 264 on our servers. I only convinced them after a long debate and contacting our legal department to explain the risk. It had very little to do with my personal views on licensing or patents and everything to do with professionalism. A lot of the other software developers thought this was wasting money and time, and paying off people that were somehow evil because they charge large sums for using their patented software. My stance has always been if yo don't like the terms use something else and avoid the ethical dilemma. It's just plain easier and avoids some risk.
A specific example - I had to convince executives that we needed to pay MPEG LA because we were using FFMPEG to encode and decode using 264 on our servers. I only convinced them after a long debate and contacting our legal department to explain the risk. It had very little to do with my personal views on licensing or patents and everything to do with professionalism. A lot of the other software developers thought this was wasting money and time, and paying off people that were somehow evil because they charge large sums for using their patented software. My stance has always been if yo don't like the terms use something else and avoid the ethical dilemma. It's just plain easier and avoids some risk.