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The Art of Unix Programming
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Unix Programming - Licensing Issues - When You Need a Lawyer

When You Need a Lawyer

This section is directed to commercial developers considering incorporating software that falls under one of these standard licenses into closed-source products.

Having gone through all this legal verbiage, the expected thing for us to do at this point is to utter a somber disclaimer to the effect that we are not lawyers, and that if you have any doubts about the legality of something you want to do with open-source software, you should immediately consult a lawyer.

With all due respect to the legal profession, this would be fearful nonsense. The language of these licenses is as clear as legalese gets — they were written to be clear — and should not be at all hard to understand if you read it carefully. The lawyers and courts are actually more confused than you are. The law of software rights is murky, and case law on open-source licenses is (as of mid-2003) nonexistent; no one has ever been sued under them.

This means a lawyer is unlikely to have a significantly better insight than a careful lay reader. But lawyers are professionally paranoid about anything they don't understand. So if you ask one, he is rather likely to tell you that you shouldn't go anywhere near open-source software, despite the fact that he probably doesn't understand the technical aspects or the author's intentions anywhere near as well as you do.

Finally, the people who put their work under open-source licenses are generally not mega-corporations attended by schools of lawyers looking for blood in the water; they're individuals or volunteer groups who mainly want to give their software away. The few exceptions (that is, large companies both issuing under open-source licenses and with money to hire lawyers) have a stake in open source and don't want to antagonize the developer community that produces it by stirring up legal trouble. Therefore, your odds of getting hauled into court on an innocent technical violation are probably lower than your chances of being struck by lightning in the next week.

This isn't to say you should treat these licenses as jokes. That would be disrespectful of the creativity and sweat that went into the software, and you wouldn't enjoy being the first litigation target of an enraged author no matter how the lawsuit came out. But in the absence of definitive case law, a visible good-faith effort to meet the author's intentions is 99% of what you can do; the additional 1% of protection you might (or might not) get by consulting a lawyer is unlikely to make a difference.


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The Art of Unix Programming
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