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

[Colin Barrett]

The main problem with this the same one we had when CFM and I  
investigated if it would be possible to change the licensing on Adium  
at some point (we were thinking BSDL). Lots of people have committed  
code to Adium, and we don't have ways of getting in contact with many  
of those people any more. Sometimes, all we have is a nickname  
(blahdeedah257), sometimes we have full names, but rarely do we  
actually have email addresses.

As I understand it (which very well may be incorrect) the current  
copyright of the Adium source belongs to all of the individuals who  
have worked on it. Technically, it says in many of the source files  
either Adam Iser or The Adium Project. I think if we're going to do  
this, we should consult an actual lawyer. Anyone know a good one?

Also, if we do "incorporate," we should come up with a really snazzy  
name ;)

-Colin

On Aug 20, 2006, at 12:49 PM, Alan Humpherys wrote:

> 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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