Debian and SqueakL revisited again...(was Re: Debian source package)

Duane Maxwell dmaxwell at san.rr.com
Fri Oct 26 03:02:07 UTC 2001


On Thursday, October 25, 2001 6:21 PM, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote
> On Thursday, October 25, 2001, at 08:19  PM, Lex Spoon wrote:
>
> > The main problem Debian has with Squeak-L is the indemnification clause,
> > not the "non-free" parts.  Would you not be worried yourself about
> > agreeing to such a clause?
>
> No.  I would expect anybody who let me play with their code for free, so
> that I was free to do anything I wanted to do with it -- including using
> it to cause damage or infringe, would expect me to hold them harmless
> when THEY got sued for MY conduct.

I agree completely.  You often hear the OSS community whining about how some
software house should release their abandoned code base as OSS (cf. BeOS,
Amiga, OpenMail, etc.) .  In today's litigious environment, no sane company
would do so unless they were able to at least raise some indemnification
barrier to protect them, so I would expect clauses like this one, and ones
that are more or less required by XYZ country's export restrictions to be
pretty much standard in anything that somehow manages to get released.  The
OSS people are eventually going to have to deal with it, or live with this
stuff never being available to them in any form.

The exobox code is being held back for a similar reason, except in this case
we need to protect against shareholders who abandoned us at funding time
from suddenly coming out of the woodwork in the case that somebody produces
something of value from it.

-- Duane





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