Re: [Fwd: [DotGNU]A good warning?] and Do we have any law people around for FD?

[TonStanco]

Absolutely necessary. 

MS will get desperate as it loses in the marketplace and will turn to legal 
weapons in a big way against free software. Remember the hint of legal 
threats in the Halloween Memos?

We heard Eben say that in France, since he expects an attack on the GPL 
directly from a proprietary controlled puppet company. Another is an attack 
on the code included in free software. We MUST maintain clean hands. People 
infected with contact to MS products need to be disinfected, before 
interacting with others and contributing code to any of our projects. 

I will have to discuss with Eben the best course to take. At a minimum, 
people have to sign a statement outlining their involvement with proprietary 
products so we can perhaps put them on unrelated development areas. Also, 
remember that talking to others about work done at proprietary companies is a 
BAD idea too. Because it can lead to a claim that the first person passed on 
trade secrets to the second who infected the free software.

We need to pay a great deal of attention to this. We need to be careful about 
Mono code, too, because they are trying to do a compatable .Net version, 
which may be more easily attacked by MS patents, trade secrets, and non 
disclosure and non compete agreements, since they are moving closer to the 
lion's den than may be prudent on a number of levels, both legal and 
practical.

As Eben said, the ultimate protection is having governments adopt free 
software for their own use. Then we can a powerful protector in our corner, 
since a branch of the government will have to rule on the GPL and any false 
proprietary claims. Also, as Eben said we need to find sympathetic lawyers in 
every country who will help locally, since proprietary may attack in each of 
the 160 nations, because they have the money to do it and may use that to 
their advantage.

We should not be surprised to see proprietary open a new front on the legal 
battlefield very soon. So we need to prepare for it emotionally and legally.

tony



> I think that is nessisary.  I do not use Microsoft products.  I do not use 
or 
> 
>  have even seen any of their preliminary .net tools.  I have never seen any 
> of 
>  their own written documentation or online publications, notes, etc, on 
.net 
>  architecture.  Hence I think I am uncontaminated :)...But this is an issue 
I 
> 
>  would like to see that we receive an answer about quickly.
>  
>  David
>  
>  Norbert Bollow wrote:
>  
>  >> These legal issues will undoubtedly get messy, but getting a legal team 
> in 
>  >> place with a community of sympathetic outside lawyers is extremely 
> important.
>  > 
>  > 
>  > Sounds very good.
>  > 
>  > For now, we could adopt a simple approach, e.g. like this:  Ask
>  > every contributor to disclose exactly how much exposure they've
>  > had to Microsoft stuff, and make them commit to report any
>  > additional exposure immediately.  Whenever there is even the
>  > slightest shade of a possible problem,  the contributor needs to
>  > wait with contributing until the legal team is in place and has
>  > provided appropriate advice.
>  >