Re: Which license am I looking for?
On Monday 19 January 2009 02:03:32 am Ben Finney wrote:
> Дмитрий Ледков <dmitrij.ledkov@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Francesco Poli wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > Same disclaimers as before: IANAL, TINLA, IANADD, TINASOTODP.
> >
> > Erhhhmm..... What do these stand for? I can only guess IANADD from
> > mentors list - does it stand for I am not a Debian Developer? What
> > about the others?
>
> For reasons I've never seen adequately explained, some people feel the
> need to periodically chastise Francesco for giving opinions and
> analyses without explicating every single time that “I Am Not A
> Lawyer”, “This Is Not Legal Advice”, “I Am Not A Debian Developer”,
> “This Is Not A Statement Of The Official Debian Position”.
>
> He apparently finds it best to include these disclaimers to forestall
> such ire. Which is a perfectly valid position for him to take, given
> the persistence of said ire, and its peculiar tendency to be directed
> at him in particular.
Stated a tad more fairly to those who have asked Fancesco to add disclaimers... Francesco has a tendency to state opinions a little too "matter-of-factly" for some d-l participents, leading those who disagree to accuse him of the cardinal sin of "giving legal advice," which is illegal in many jurisdictions (certainly the United States) without proper certification. However, I agree with Ben that the disclaimers are ludicrous... not because they are unecessary, but because they are insufficient. You either are, or are not, giving legal advice, and no amount of disclaimers changes that. One cannot say "you should phrase your license X, Y, and Z... but this isn't legal advice". It is, and if someone where to suffer economic harm by following said advice, they would have grounds to bring suit against you for malpractice and praciting without a license.
The long of the short of it being... be careful how specific you are with legal stuff in all settings. The closer you get to a specific set of facts, the closer you get to giving advice, the more liability you expose yourself to.
This has been a public service announcement. Feel free to search on the archives for a lot more, from me, about this very topic, as I make this same little speach everytime someone makes claims about disclaimers :)
-Sean
--
Sean Kellogg
e: skellogg@gmail.com
w: http://blog.probonogeek.org/
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.
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