Licensing question

[Thomas Wuerthinger]

Sidharth,

Thanks for your mail. I absolutely agree with you.

In general, any question related to the project is welcome on the Graal mailing list. Graal team members will never view such a question as a waste of time :).

- thomas


> On 01 Oct 2016, at 08:15, Sidharth Kshatriya <sid.kshatriya at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 4:26 AM, dalibor topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>> On a technical mailing list, typically none of the participants,
>> regardless who happens to be their employer, are qualified to provide
>> opinions on legal matters in any jurisdiction.
>> 
>> Qualification is not a matter of feelings.
>> 
>> For many professions, such as the legal one, it's matter of local formal
>> education and local certification.
>> 
>> 
> You're absolutely correct in what you say. But, if you read Raffaello's
> original question he says, "[...] I'm just looking for unbinding opinions,
> not legal advice."
> 
> After many years of woking with various licenses and open source projects,
> some developers do build an (amateur) understanding of licenses and
> copyright. I think Raffaello was hoping for some non-formal help in that
> sense -- which he did get from mailing list participants. There were some
> very useful responses and Raffaello seemed to indicate that his question
> was answered.
> 
> Contacting a lawyer qualified in intellectual property law (and familiar
> with open source licensing) to give a legal opinion on a licensing query
> is, of course, the correct and appropriate approach and it is for Raffaello
> to make that determination whether he needs to go down that route.
> 
> My intention was also to suggest that open source projects like yours
> *will* get the occasional licensing question. Developers send licensing
> questions to technical mailing lists because these technical mailings lists
> are practically the only forums where people understand the *specific*
> software stack in detail to be able to give an (informal) answer.
> Additionally, in many cases legal firms may end up giving very generic
> advice as they don't have a deep technical understanding of the specific
> software stack (unless you're will to pay top dollar for lawyers who may
> have some software/engineering backgrounds).
> 
> Essentially, how you guys wish to deal with licensing questions is totally
> your prerogative but answering those questions in this mailing list (with
> the usual disclaimers) or kindly pointing people to practical, inexpensive
> resources elsewhere will only help your project grow.
> 
> Sidharth