shielding from liability
From: Rick Hawkins <rhawkins@iastate.edu>
> However, were an individual programmer to incure liability (the only
> way I can think of off hand is by deliberately caused harm, such as
> sneaking in a disk eraser), the corporation won't protect that
> individual.
We would likely pursue criminal charges against someone who caused harm
with malice aforethought. However there are negligence scenarios, for
example a maintainer who accepts a patch without realizing that it contains
a trojan-horse program. I want to shield our developers from individual
liability in that sort of case.
> It will, howver, protect the other developers, who could potentially face
> liability, or at least incur staggering defense costs.
> However, the legal costs of being right aren't small.
Did you notice that The Linux Mall was selling legal liability defense
plans for programmers? I would hate to have every developer need to pay
for that. Having a corporation sounds like a much better idea.
Bruce
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Bruce Perens K6BP bruce@debian.org 510-215-3502
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