I have my own war stories from working at Qualcomm. Gather together, children.
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
I used to explain Qualcomm as a navy of lawyers and a dinghy of developers.
I spent SO MUCH TIME getting legal review to publish code.
One of my favorite battles was someone out there in the wild took the Microsoft boilerplate MIDL (MIT 2.0) and stripped the headers, licensing them as GPL. So our boilerplate MIDL files suddenly got ducked and we couldn't ship them any more.
Ah so the Oracle syndrome, where the engineering is a sidekick in the lawyer business?
In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s
Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
Eh. I used to work for a large corporation that had multiple development sites worldwide. I remember telling someone at another site that I was considering using an OSS library. His jaw dropped, "You can use Open-Source? At our location using OSS is a fireable offence."
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
The feature was canned unceremoniously. Fin.