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Comment by solomatov | Hacker News Reader

I am not a lawyer, but it seems the issue is the following:

- For a contract to work it should be accepted

- OSS projects which are just available online, could be download without performing or even reading a license

- One of the important clauses to shield from legal liability is limitation of liability clause, i.e. you use the software as is, and won't be able to make the author accountable for damages caused by software

- MIT license has such a clause

- We now have a precedent when a developer is held liable due to damage allegedly caused by such software

Consequences of this precedent are super scary

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> We now have a precedent when a developer is held liable due to damage allegedly caused by such software

Forced to go to a full trial over it, instead of being able discharge it on a summary basis.

This sounds a lot better, but in terms of the impact it's not clear how much better it is-- the cost from this will be almost entirely in defending it.

It's not about damages caused; the suit is over a claim that open source developers have a fiduciary/beneficiary relationship with users, and so have an obligation to act in their users' best interests. In which case, BitCoin devs would need to fork the chain to hand a few hefty wallets over.

> In which case, BitCoin devs would need to fork the chain to hand a few hefty wallets over.

It's even worse than that, of course, because creating the backdoored version they demanded wouldn't and couldn't make anyone run it (and it's inconceivable to me that more than a negligible number would-- particularly seeing how there are no automatic updates by design for security reasons). Their position is that we're responsible for it being effective too.

I think if it were just a demand to backdoor the software one of the defendants might have done so-- "Here you go, now screw off". But that clearly wouldn't have made the plaintiff go away (and might have landed them in litigation from the actual owners of the assets, even though the backdoor had no effect except maybe the creation of yet another forked blockchain that no one uses).

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