On 06/18/2015 04:34 PM, Stefan Reich wrote: > You're not a lawyer, but you let software development be controlled by > lawyers?
Failing to follow the advice of lawyers can have extremely expensive, and even more unpleasant consequences. The procedures setup by the Apache Software Foundation are to prevent: * Claims of copyright infringement; * Claims of trademark infringement; * Claims of service mark infringement; * Claims of patent infringement; The cost of successfully defending a patent infringement lawsuit is ten million dollars. The cost of successfully defending copyright, trademark, and service mark lawsuits is roughly five million dollars. Whilst the procedures and steps setup by ASF won't prevent lawsuits, they do: * establish the providence of each line of code in each program; * the providence under which the ASF project can use a service mark, or trademark; * the legal right of a project to utilize a specific something that has been patented; If a legal dispute about something erupts, ASF's legal counsel can go to the source, showing the chain of evidence supporting the legal right of the project, to use whatever is being used, that the other party is claiming they can not use. Whilst that doesn't help against parties that are unreasonable, it does mean that the odds of ASF prevailing in a lawsuit are extremely high. Nonetheless, even prevailing means a loss. There are few, if any steps that can be taken, to minimize the risk of an unreasonable party filing a frivolous lawsuit that is extremely expensive to fight. jonathon * English - detected * English * English <javascript:void(0);> <#>
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