[Adium-devl] Fwd: Adium, SoC taxes, and seed keys

[Alan Humpherys]

As Eric Peyton found in the early days of Fire, it is quite possible  
for Open Source developers to be sued.  (In his case, by AOL).  For  
that reason, he set up a legal entity "EpicWare, Inc." which is an S- 
corporation that has no assets other than ownership of the source  
code of Fire.  That way, if sued, they could shut down the  
development, but not go after him personally.

I am not a lawyer (Far too much intelligence to do that) but it is  
still quite possible that anyone can be sued at any time for any  
reason, that being said, a corporation owning Adium can provide a  
small amount of indemnification for the individual contributors.  For  
this to work, all contributors would need to enter an agreement that  
they are assigning their rights under copyright and patent law to the  
corporation for all submissions they make to the project.  (Very  
similar to the standard intellectual property agreements in use by  
most technology focused companies)

Alan

P.S. Sorry for the long delay in the response here...  I was out of  
the country
______
Alan Humpherys
alan at ewonderz.com



On Aug 18, 2006, at 8:28 AM, dcclark at mtu.edu wrote:

>> As a legal entity, couldn't Adium be sued?
>
> As an informal collection of people, any one of the developers  
> could be
> sued instead, personally.
>
> Not that this is likely, but as a formal entity, Adium has more legal
> resilience.
>
> Dave (the old one)
>
>
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