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

[Ahmed Charles <acharles@...>]

On 11/3/2016 12:24 PM, Russell Haley wrote:
> *To clarify:  "Lua proper carries no legal risk due to the MIT
> license" ... So long as the copyright is included with the source and
> binary distributions.
> 
> On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 12:22 PM, Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
> 

Mostly as an amusing aside, I'm curious if you would view being sued as
a risk? And if so, are you suggesting that no one will ever get sued due
to using/distributing Lua, for the remainder of time? And moreover, are
you personally indemnifying everyone now and forever, against being sued
due to the use/distribution of Lua?

While, I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that the standard for asserting
that there is no risk is to indemnify entities against said risk, which
is exactly what ActiveState is selling.

I suppose you could simply believe said risk doesn't exist and that
indemnification is useless, but that's not really the same as suggesting
that their marketing material is incorrect/ambiguous.