Hello Matt, Your only business liability I can see is that some one else will use the source code that you've made available under the GPL and start doing what you're doing. Another entity, choosing to infringe on the GPL you've used for your code could try to use that code in their own non-GPL product, and I believe you'd have to take action against them to enforce the GPL... but you'd probably find that you'd get quite a bit of assistance from the open source community and the Free Software Foundation to mount a challenge... it'd probably also be better than any marketing you could buy... In my opinion, you're in a much better position than, for instance, someone selling software under a commercial license.
We've investigated liability insurance, and our findings: 1. have good terms and conditions, signed before doing anything - make sure you define the legal jurisdiction to be NZ... 2. get standard public liability insurance (pretty cheap for $1million coverage) 3. don't worry about other professional indemnity because you can pay a lot for it, and most times, the insurers refuse to pay up because their terms are loose enough that they can generally avoid it, so it doesn't offer much real protection. 4. don't do business in the US - most commercial insurance you can get in NZ specifically excludes the US thanks to its culture of litigation. In our experience, insurance companies don't "get" software development (never mind *open source* software development). Regarding lawyers, the person who's emerged as an expert on open source in NZ law is Guy Burgess - http://www.burgess.co.nz/ Hope that helps, Dave On Aug 19, 12:43 pm, matt_thomson <[email protected]> wrote: > I sell a bit of PHP based software (photo gallery script) that is > licensed under the GPL. > > I'm looking to get advice on what my liabilities are, and what > liability insurance (if any) I need to get. > > Does anyone know a lawyer who specializes in software licenses? 99% of > my sales are overseas so preferably they would know a bit about > international situations. > > Thanks, > > Matt. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
