[ZODB-Dev] Increasing the number of ZODB developers

[Tim Peters]

[Andreas Jung]
> The indemnification clause "Committer indemnifies ZC against violations".
> This clause is in fact a very general clause which says all and nothing.
> Can ZC sue me if I commit some GPL code or if commit the Windows sources?
> I am aware that are must be some clause to protect ZC in some way. On the
> other hand I wonder whether  such a clause could be enforced or not and
> whether general clauses are compatible with national law. Ok, you can
> could sue me  before a court in US but at the first glance Europe is far
> away....any thoughts?

Thoughts from your own lawyer may be worth something, but thoughts from
other computer geeks probably aren't.  Note that the agreement doesn't
actually mention patents, so "'violations' of what?" is an important
question.  Presumably it's violations of:

    Committer represents and warrants that the Committed Code does not
    violate the rights of any person or entity, and that the Committer
    has legal authority to enter into this Agreement and legal authority
    over Contributed Code.

When I was asked to sign something similar in a different context, my lawyer
at the time told me I was legally incompetent to warrant or represent
anything of the sort:  I'm not a lawyer, so simply cannot make a meaningful
representation about _any_ legal issue.  I could warrant, for example, that
I'm at least 21 years old, or that my code performed according to its
documentation, but those aren't questions of law:  they're questions about
things I'm competent to answer.  A different lawyer said the same thing, but
the two lawyers in question drew different conclusions.  One said "go ahead
and sign" because asking me to do the impossible was clearly unenforceable;
the other said "don't sign", and suggested that he might sue me for "unfair
competition" if I signed something claiming to make representations about
matters of law <wink>.

So if you want to be legally covered, take the advice you pay your lawyer to
give you, or pay a lawyer to give you the advice you want to hear.  They'll
defend that advice if necessary.

OTOH, I personally don't give a rip about lawyers' conflicting opinions
anymore.  If, for example, someone actually sued Zope Corp, or, say, Dieter,
for adding a "size=" field to fsdump.py's output, I expect that the open
source community would contribute millions to the defense.  Even more to the
point, it's not going to happen to begin with.

Those are my thoughts, but they are indeed incompetent from a legal point of
view.