Would publishing code under a limited company be a viable approach to avoid liabilities from OSS?
Of course it shouldn’t be necessary, I’m just trying to think of a practical way for an individual to avoid this scenario.
Of course it shouldn’t be necessary, I’m just trying to think of a practical way for an individual to avoid this scenario.
Paraphrasing, the answer I got was: "Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, and then we have a legal process to determine the result. If you're a director of the company, they're probaby going to sue you personally, and you're going to have to spend a lot of money to argue that you personally shouldn't be liable. Hopefully you'll be successful. It'll all depend on the facts, so you'll need to get sued first before I can give you a better answer. Either way, it's going to cost you money."
My conclusion is that the legal system is not super great when a bad-faith actor is involved. Though, really, it's also not super great when good-faith actors are involved, either.
I think in general structural improvement like that are most effective against 'honest' opponents-- someone whos goal is to win and recover their costs and damages. A legal structure that limits liability makes recovery less likely, so they don't bring the action at all.
For an opponent who's goal is to harass and ultimately crush the opposition, I think that kind of tool is probably less effective. It's also harder to justify doing when you're just following a volunteer passion over something speculative and worthless (as was the case of the Bitcoin related defendants-- almost all of whom started close to the beginning of Bitcoin).
[And as an aside: to the extent that development is done on an uncompensated purely voluntary basis, it would be difficulty to legitimize the LLC, e.g. little to no income or expenses or other documentation that the LLC is anything but a piece of paper.]
But this also follows along the answers "since you're not in the UK why not ignore it"-- if a court later decides to allow recovery of assets that came from the LLC or pierce the corporate veil entirely you're screwed-- at that point you lost your chance to defend yourself.
Recommended a scheme to shield OSS developers from liability. I am not a lawyer, so it looked a bit overly cautious to me, but it seems that was a good idea.
A Ltd company would help a little, but individuals within a company still have fiduciary responsibility.