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Unix Programming - Licensing Issues - When You Need a Lawyer
When You Need a Lawyer
This section is directed to commercial developers considering
incorporating software that falls under one of these standard licenses
into closed-source products.
Having gone through all this legal verbiage, the expected thing
for us to do at this point is to utter a somber disclaimer to the
effect that we are not lawyers, and that if you have any
doubts about the legality of something you want to do with open-source
software, you should immediately consult a lawyer.
With all due respect to the legal profession, this would be
fearful nonsense. The language of these licenses is as clear as
legalese gets — they were written to be clear — and should
not be at all hard to understand if you read it carefully. The lawyers
and courts are actually more confused than you are. The law of
software rights is murky, and case law on open-source licenses is
(as of mid-2003) nonexistent; no one has ever been sued under
them.
This means a lawyer is unlikely to have a significantly better
insight than a careful lay reader. But lawyers are professionally
paranoid about anything they don't understand. So if you ask one, he
is rather likely to tell you that you shouldn't go anywhere near
open-source software, despite the fact that he probably doesn't
understand the technical aspects or the author's intentions anywhere
near as well as you do.
Finally, the people who put their work under open-source
licenses are
generally not mega-corporations attended by schools of lawyers looking
for blood in the water; they're individuals or volunteer groups who
mainly want to give their software away. The few exceptions (that is,
large companies both issuing under open-source licenses and with
money to hire lawyers) have a stake in open source and don't want to
antagonize the developer community that produces it by stirring up
legal trouble. Therefore, your odds of getting hauled into court on
an innocent technical violation are probably lower than your chances
of being struck by lightning in the next week.
This isn't to say you should treat these licenses as jokes. That
would be disrespectful of the creativity and sweat that went into the
software, and you wouldn't enjoy being the first litigation target of
an enraged author no matter how the lawsuit came out. But in the
absence of definitive case law, a visible good-faith effort to meet
the author's intentions is 99% of what you can do; the additional 1%
of protection you might (or might not) get by consulting a lawyer is
unlikely to make a difference.
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