From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-07-20T04:37:07+09:00
Subject: Ruby legalities & The Ruby Foundation

There have been several posts recently about the legality of using Ruby in 
commercial products.  One poster even refuses to look at the Ruby source 
code because he fears it will somehow taint his BSD licensed code.

I think most of these fears are unfounded and are based 
on misunderstandings of the current Ruby license, but they seem to be 
excluding Ruby from some commercial projects.

I suggested this in another thread, but perhaps it wasn't widely read:
In order to address the paranoia about Ruby's licensing scheme perhaps 
the Ruby Foundation (the soon-to-be non-profit Foundation for funding Ruby 
projects) could hire an IP lawyer to look into Ruby's license scheme and 
then either issue an opinion exonerating Ruby's license or issue an 
opinion suggesting changes that might be needed.  I suspect this would 
be $1000 to $2000 well spent to dispense with the licensing FUD that 
seems to be out there.  Then when questions about Ruby license come up we 
could point them to a web page that shows a letter from a Lawyer that 
would (hopefully) ease people's fears.  Or, if the Lawyer comes back with 
some problem areas perhaps we could address them.

It's really too bad that we would have to spend money on something 
like this, but perhaps we could even find a Lawyer affiliated with the EFF 
or similar organization who would do the work pro-bono.

Phil