So a co-irker called me over because of a strange case that came in. He pulled it up, and I read it over. It was from one of our South American resellers. They forwarded us a message from their client:
First: yes you do. It's damn near unavoidable if you use anything running any sort of linux (which our appliance does, and so does a lot of other networking gear). Even Windows contains free code. Hell the smart thermostat for your air conditioner probably contains some free code.
Second: our appliance, with its own custom version of linux and our software on top, is most certainly not "free and unwarranted." You paid tens of thousands of dollars for it, and tens of thousands more for support (that's your warranty, there).
Third: Okay, fine--don't run uname then. Or mv. Or cp. Heck, just don't log into the bloody thing at all. Or at least, don't look at the version information for uname.
Ran the command "uname --v" and observed the following output:
uname (GNU coreutils) 8.13
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
This is very concerning to us, we are a bank and do not use free and unwarranted software.
uname (GNU coreutils) 8.13
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
This is very concerning to us, we are a bank and do not use free and unwarranted software.
Second: our appliance, with its own custom version of linux and our software on top, is most certainly not "free and unwarranted." You paid tens of thousands of dollars for it, and tens of thousands more for support (that's your warranty, there).
Third: Okay, fine--don't run uname then. Or mv. Or cp. Heck, just don't log into the bloody thing at all. Or at least, don't look at the version information for uname.
Comment