Legacy Approval - CodeIgniter License Agreement

[Josh Berkus]

On 10/24/2010 06:01 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> The indemnity clause is rather broad; while two licenses with upstream
> indemnification requirements, Apache 2.0 and Eclipse Public License
> 1.0 (plus its ancestors), are OSI-approved, those clauses are narrower
> than this one. I myself don't think licenses with blanket
> indemnification clauses should be accepted as Open Source witho
> further study, or some consensus among other organizations/projects
> involved in license gatekeeping (e.g. FSF, Debian, Fedora) that they
> present no problem.

I'd like to see the analysis of an attorney on this indemnity clause. 
If I encountered such a clause in a paid contract, I'd ask our company 
attorney about it, and I don't think it's a slam dunk for OSS.

For example, the indemnity clause would seem to say that, if the 
upstream project inserted some illegally obtained code into the product, 
then the users become 100% legally liable for the defense of the project 
-- which is frankly worse than a Microsoft or Adobe proprietary license. 
  To my non-lawyer eyes anyway.

--Josh Berkus