[noirscape]

The point of this story is that open source can't protect you against a bully with a legal department at his command, and neither can it protect you against bad contract clauses. Frivolous legal threats may be frivolous, but you have to prove that in court and a lot of companies would rather take the easier way out to avoid having to do that.

The "FOSS" company never directly threatened the author, but the implication of it alone was enough to scare off both agencies. Given a lot of the tech is mixed up here on purpose, there's a few FOSS companies & vendors I can think of with legal departments that I'd describe as "pretty aggressive" and "expensive for a managed solution" that aren't solely about Exchange related services but would definitely behave like this, given their PR over the years at times has had slipped masks.

[citizenpaul]

>a bully with a legal department

This basically sums up modern corporate status quo. T

> "pretty aggressive"

The legal system has been weaponized against the average person. This is the veil it hides behind. A legal department can be downright boring yet vicious at the same time. Like how they slow roll any employee legal dispute to the maximum legal time limit in expectation that they can financially out wait the employee. Which they almost always can.

[m-s-y]

> The point of this story is…

The point is that without the identifying information it might as well be a creative writing exercise.

Good anecdotes have power because they actually happened and are verifiable to some degree. This is neither.

[passivegains]

Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a creative writing exercise which didn't actually happen and isn't verifiably true to any degree. There were never any Finches, Ewells, Robinsons or Radleys, yet readers often find it quite powerful because they're perfectly aware the story's events have played out between real people many, many times. They don't need to be told the real names of people who have been in lynch mobs to know real people have been lynched. Email servers aren't quite as heavy a subject, but we know these things happen.