From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@9fans.net Date: Tue, 15 May 2012 08:42:08 +0000 From: IainWS Message-ID: <0241c0fa-837a-4a49-9bbf-6381fee45532@o3g2000pby.googlegroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 References: <836eec6b1f8009ba1aeee8b198d88201@quintile.net>, Subject: Re: [9fans] Governance question??? Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8c3b5274-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Thank you, I kind of got the idea that Plan 9 is an informal hobby/ research platform, and that the community contributes where they can, unless its something serious like a new release (probably not up to everybody). > Who handles legal issues? The answer's probably "nobody". Or > everyone handles their own. That's not an entirely good thing, but > it's certainly worked reasonably so far. The Software Freedom Law Center (S.F.L.C.) is a good resource for this. Indeed it is worthwhile for a project to maintain things like trademarks (such as Glenda) from stammers attempting to take or abuse the idea. Red-Hat actively maintains its trademark, but has the money to do so (apparently its costly). Indeed complying with the licence is better result and can be achieved by a phone call or email as the violators do so because they don't understand free and open source software licencing in the first place. The main idea with having a legal officer I guess is to protect intellectual property. If a big corporation like Microsoft takes a certain idea and tries to step around the licencing agreement in place - they should be accountable!