Re: [gentoo-nfp] Gentoo Social Contract and potential liabilities

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Anthony G. Basile
<basile@××××××××××××××.edu> wrote:
> That's true, they're mostly risk adverse.  But asking is good no matter what
> answer we get.  These emails leave a track the we took due diligence.
> That's what's bothering me after the last committee meeting.  We're all just
> bantering our opinions about and haven't sought any expert advice.

Honestly, in this field there aren't actually a lot of bona-fide
experts, because there isn't a lot of bona-fide litigation.  How many
court decisions have there been around FOSS licenses and issues?  Just
about everybody offers their opinions.  :)

But, I certainly don't object to getting advice.

> The other avenue is FSF.

I'd be curious was to what advice they'd give, but we already fall far
short of their ideals.  As I mentioned, gentoo.org would probably not
rate even a C on their source repository evaluation because we
recommend the use of evil licenses like GPL2+ instead of the more
appropriate GPL3+.  And I'm all for switching to GPL3+, but they tend
to represent more of an extreme than Gentoo in general, and obviously
they have a bias, even if it is a bias I tend to be sympathetic to.

SPI and other organizations might be useful.

In any case, from what I can tell the Trustees are trying to sort out
the counsel situation in general anyway, as I believe Matt had been
dealing with most of that in the past.  The Foundation does generally
try to seek legal advice when necessary, and I think it is mostly
pro-bono.  There are actually a few organizations that would probably
offer us various kinds of legal services from advice to
administration.

-- 
Rich