Re: shielding from liability
On Thu, 21 Aug 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:
> 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.
hmm. Bruce, we might be able to use that as a selling point to have more
upstream authors become the debian maintainers.
Shaya
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