Ask HN: Huge enterprise customer wants to see our source code • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Huge enterprise customer wants to see our source code

#291

Post by _ah » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #141

hoodoof wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All business is a variation on this. If you're wanting to be a business person in a "nice" world where its not all about manipulation and sleight of hand then you can do that but you won't be mega successful. Read up on Bill Gates Windows license contracts that the hardware manufacturers had to sign .... genius. Truth is all in how you tell the story.

I remember the day a friend explained to me that MS Word, Internet Explorer, and MS Frontpage were the same DLL just with different entry points.

Your friend was lying to you.

Source: I'm a former MSFT employee, and I've spent WAY too much time working in the Office codebase.

Re: Ask HN: Huge enterprise customer wants to see our source code

#292

Post by PeterisP » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 12:16 PM UTC

awinder wrote: post #80

anonacct37 wrote: post #42

I'll offer a different pov from many other comments. I work for a fortune 50 basically doing web server stuff. Right now our security team would like to run some startups code synchronously as a module in our web server. Their code could easily cost us millions off dollars (if the outage was small). I need to make sure their sdk is free of race conditions, and has proper timeouts and throttling and has proper metrics…

Are you going to audit all of their code changes from now into perpetuity as well? It seems like you kinda alluded to the thing that would actually be effective, which is not synchronously calling external services in high-uptime-requirement applications...

Sure, why not?

In such environments you anyway wouldn't deploy a new version from a vendor without extensive testing, so it's not something you do frequently and you can re-audit at the time. If you're paying a few million per year for a licence, then it's not an issue to spend $10k worth of manpower per upgrade to ensure that it goes properly.

Re: Ask HN: Huge enterprise customer wants to see our source code

#293

Post by patjohnson » Mon, Dec 11, 2017, 12:17 PM UTC

This is a legal issue which files under compliance. Many times enterprises that are looking to acquire a small company they will request code audit. This audit usually is requested after the agreement of sale. For legal reasons, this provides the safety that your company doesn't provide any compliance issues moving forward in your code. This process is just playing it safe so there wont be any legal issues moving forward. WhiteSource easily verifies license compliances on premises or using their Saas program. They provide a very timely report that will ease the process. https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/open-source-license-comp...