From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie)
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2017 09:52:34 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] SunOS vs Linux
In-Reply-To: <201701080610.v086AMr7084906@chez.mckusick.com>
References: <201701080610.v086AMr7084906@chez.mckusick.com>
Message-ID: <03f001d269be$d930ea50$8b92bef0$@ronnatalie.com>

> The lawyers came back and said that "giving away SunOS technology could
lead to a stockholder lawsuit concerning the giving away of stockholder
assets." End of discussion. We had to go with MACH.

Gosh, this strikes a nerve.    The engineers at our company all had access
to the license generator (which we wrote).   The thing had an easy way to
kick out a 30-day demo license, so we always used that.    When we got
bought by a publicly traded company, they determined that the license keys
were an essential stockholder asset and took the license generator away from
us.   We all just edited out the code that checked the license out of the
program.   In fact, I believe at least one major release went out with an
undocumented environment variable that disabled the licensing system which
probably was a much bigger risk to stockholder assets than letting the
engineers issue themselves demo licenses.