[Harmony-Review] Harmony agreement question

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

The harmony-users list is still silent, so forgive me to post it here :)

In the summaries on the website, the incentives for a OS Foundation to  
implement a developer agreement are outlined for a number of clear  
cases.
http://harmonyagreements.org/overview.html

What I miss however, is an investigation or solution for individuals  
to be protected legally themselves as well. If a developer would sign  
up for an agreement - whether or not migrating copyrights - the  
agreement could provide provisions that would make the Foundation  
itself liable for certain cases... especially when it comes to patent  
and "IP infringement" issues.

Recently - past months - Blender Foundation has been in this situation  
twice. Our open/free 3D tool increasingly is being considered more  
competitive I guess. In the past months, this has lead to companies  
threatening individual Blender devs to start legal actions against them.

One case I've solved by migrating copyright to BF, and do the disputed  
commits (that didn't happen yet) myself. The developer then got hired  
by me (my own company) on further work on the topic, which gives him a  
reasonable protection. This solution seems to have the company to back  
off. (Didn't hear anything anymore).

The other case is more nasty. A USA 3D software market leader (worth  
quarter a billion or more) asked their lawyers firm to start an  
investigation on one of our USA developers, they sent out a "Cease and  
Desist" to him, with an undefined claim he was violating their IP.
We're having help from softwarefreedom.org in this case. To my quite  
disappointed surprise, there seems to be nothing we can do whatsoever  
to protect the individual - apart from backing him up with legal  
advice or accept potential costs for legal support.

Although softwarefreedom.org told me that this is quite a rare case -  
no individual open source developer ever got sued for IP infringement  
- it's currently at least for BF a very relevant and actual topic. If  
my above two examples ever get to a public case, I'm quite sure  
individual developers in our community will want to know what their  
real rights are, and what it means for them to sign such a Developer  
Agreement without getting any actual protection in return.

BTW: Blender Foundation is registered in the Netherlands.

Thanks,

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands