Public Domain and liability
Blake Cretney
bcretney at postmark.net
Mon Aug 7 20:01:07 UTC 2000
One reason people don't often release software to the public domain is
fear of liability. The concern is that even if you place a
disclaimer on the software, someone could legally distribute your
software without the disclaimer. Then, if the software fails in some
way, you could be sued as the manufacturer of defective software.
Now, to me, this sounds crazy. However, I'm not a lawyer, and often
legal decisions leave me amazed. Has anyone ever been sued,
especially successfully, for a non-malicious public domain program?
Does anyone have any comment on whether this is likely to happen?
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Blake Cretney
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