The State of Python

Gary Momarison nobody at phony.org
Thu Aug 3 20:45:13 EDT 2000


Someone else wrote:

> > WARNING (IANAL but have been advised by one)
> > Putting something in the public domain involves releasing it without a
> > license and I have been told that this is extremely risky. Apparently the
> > primary purpose of a BSD style license is to limit liability - typically to
> > no more than you paid for the software (i.e. nothing). With out such a
> > license clause, or indeed a license at all, you are potentially open to
> > unlimited liability in the event that a user of your software suffers harm
> > from such use - even though they paid nothing for it.
> > This struck me as insane, but I have been assured that this is the case.

Of course a lawyer would tell you that. It tends to enrich them.  We'll
need to read some court rulings or several other kinds of evidence to
judge the true situation.

IANAL either, but I recall reading both opinions many times.  I come
down on the side of "disclaimer/license reduces risk, but risk of
donation to PD is negligable".  Have you ever heard of a case?

I notice that TV How-To programs (who give away their product in some
sense) don't worry about liability.  Neither do almost all book
publishers (who sell their product in some sense).  I think that
the (common?) law as enforced by courts holds people harmless in many 
situations such as this.  I suspect that simply including a disclaimer/
warning in the code would reduce risks even further.

There's another consideration regarding PD software.  Many people
won't use it unless it has a well-identified "donor" and associated
release of copyright, because they fear it is copyrighted code that
someone has just stripped of copyright claims.  They don't worrry,
for some reason, that similar owner/license changing shenanigans 
could be done with copyrighted code too.



More information about the Python-list mailing list