> Kent Borg said on Wed, 24 Jul 2024 10:39:33 -0700 > >>On 7/24/24 10:06, Daniel M Gessel wrote: >>> The failure does seem incompetent to the point of negligence and I >>> wouldn't be surprised to see it tested in court: big companies lost >>> large amounts of money; lawsuits may start happening soon. >> >>That would be nice. > > Before you call lawsuits nice, contemplate that it might cause > employment contracts to have indemnification clauses. For developers, > this would be anything but nice.
A decade or two ago, I was a freelance contractor. I have some open source technologies I would customize and deploy for money. I got out of doing this because contracts started to get pretty onerous. I had one customer who wanted me to indemnify them for any inadvertent copyright infringement. This was as the whole Caldera thing was going on and there was suspicion that Linux infringed on BSD and that Caldera/SCO claimed the copyrights to BSD. I had to respond with a document that stated that to the best of my knowledge that I did not infringe on any copyright and that I abided by the terms and conditions of any and all third party licenses. They responded "It's just a standard contract." I responded that "there is no such thing as a standard contract" and I need that clause removed because, seriously I don't have the money to defend a copyright law suite from a corporation, not for what they were paying me for the contract. Software isn't what it was 20 years ago. Today, more than ever, the world runs on software and every bit of it, at some point, directly or indirectly can threaten the lives and livelihood of people. A lowly GPL library intended to do something completely innocuous may knock out a piece of life sustaining equipment or crash a plane or bring down computers in hospital operating rooms. The industry is no longer the "wild wild west." Something is going to happen, I'm not sure what, but I bet it will be terrible. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@driftwood.blu.org https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
