Stephen Stafford wrote:
> > > Duane Maxwell wrote:
> > > > 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.
>
> No.  The don't need an indemnification barrier.  All they need it the
> standard "no warranty express or implied, if it blows your house up,
> causes the end of the world or makes your wife pregnant then you have
> comeback" type clause.  See the plethora of free licenses which have
> this (GPL, BSD, etc)

The difference is that the GPL and BSD licenses typically cover software
developed in toto under that license.  In this case, however, this is closed
source software begin converted to open source - which means that the
heritage can be traced back to a large and fairly well-heeled corporation
that can be targeted by litigation as a deep-pocket defendant.

One of the arguments raised against OSS is that that there's no one to hold
responsible in the case of a problem - in fact MS touts the support of a
solid corporation as one of the benefits of using their software, no matter
how absurd that claim actually is in reality.

I'm curious if you have any nontrivial examples of previously closed
software whose ownership was originally held by a substantial corporation
that was released open source under an unmodified GPL or BSD license.

Cheers -

-- Duane