Re: Legal Risk (was Re: Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 11:12 AM, Frank Kastenholz
<fkastenholz@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> There are legal risks other than the license that Very Large Corporations take into account
> when using open source software.  Some of these are concerns about whether the software
> is covered by patents, or might be a leaked trade secret or is otherwise proprietary.   These
> concerns become critical when the open source software is to be used in some product the
> company is developing.
>
> I'm just speaking in general.  I do not believe that these are problems with respect to Lua.
> I do not know what ActiveState is planning, if anything, in this regard.

And I fully support them providing services (legal, moral, hand
holding or otherwise) to these ends. However, from the website:
"eliminating legal risk that goes along with distributing Lua in
commercial applications." This statement is clearly incorrect. Lua
proper carries no legal risk due to the MIT license.

Moreover, I haven't seen a single Lua package from Luarocks or
LuaForge or Github that was not MIT or more liberal (shout out to Mr.
Egor Skriptunoff and the WTFNMFPL-1.0 license at
https://tldrlegal.com/license/do-what-the-fuck-you-want-to-but-it's-not-my-fault-public-license-v1-(wtfnmfpl-1.0)#fulltext).
The permissive licensing that is used by Lua and it's community is why
I am %100 behind Lua (and FreeBSD for that matter).

While I absolutely support a Canadian company from my home province
selling licensing for value-added services, I do not support ANY
company allowing marketers to miss-use technical or legal ambiguity to
produce patently incorrect marketing material. Once again, I am not
attempting to dictate, influence, control or express any opinion on
their business model or services. I simply wanted to point out that
the communities permissive licensing is being miss-represented and
suggested that it be corrected on the website.

Please, nobody perceive this email as angry, rude, kind or gentle.
There is no tone to this email other than informative (and yes,
expressing my support or lack thereof is informative. It explains the
logic as to why I have taken my current stance). I thought I was being
helpful by taking the time to review their material and pointing out
something that I know to be incorrect.


Cheers,

Russ