I researched copyright/patent liability insurance for a commercial
customer a while back. It can be had for 1.5 to 2.5 percent of the
insured amount per year. If you want $1 Million coverage you will be
paying $15,000 to $25,000 per year.
But the member is not the insured party. The corporation is. I don't
think it works for the corporation to indemnify a member the way this
insurance might have helped a company indemnify a customer. This brings
us back to the same point. If we can establish rules by which the
developer is working on behalf of the corporation, they can:
1. Not have their personal assets at stake. This can easily be over
USD$1M if you own a home, so it's a big deal. Younger folks will have
less at risk, but I'd assume that as a group we're aging.
2. Possibly take advantage of Volunteer Protection Acts.
However, SPI is not necessarily the best organization to implement this,
now, because it holds its own assets.
The biggest problem in making this happen is that the membership must to
some degree work at the direction of the corporation, and that direction
would include that the members not deliberately put the corporation at
risk by doing stupid stuff like knowledgable violations of someone
else's copyright, installing stuff that would get Debian sued into the
distribution like obscentity, etc.. The last time I tried, I had
difficulty selling this to the DDs.
I think the best structure in which to do this today would be a separate
purpose-built corporation that DDs (and other project developers) could
opt into. The folks who could not live with the rules would be able to
stay out.
Thanks
Bruce
Josh Berkus wrote:
Bruce,
The founders are myself and Tim Sailer. Our specific goal at the time
was to protect Debian developers from personal liability by giving them
a corporate shield. This purpose was not achieved, but IMO is more
important today than it was in 1998.
Well, Debian certainly has the funds to insure the developers, provided that
they could find an insurance provider. Just a suggestion.
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