[Discuss] curious statement on github about oshwa certiification

[j. eric townsend]

> On Jul 3, 2016, at 01:56, Nancy Ouyang <nancy.ouyang at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Err, was more wondering about the last phrase, "the only thing that certification adds to a project is increased liability to civil suits," which I'm sure is a very unflattering portrayal of the value that certification adds, unless I'm very confused.

Two disclaimers:

- I am not a lawyer and this is not legal opinion.

- I worked at TiVo for 10 years (left several years ago) and had the previous disclaimer pounded in to my thick skull. :-)

Based on the confusion I’ve seen with lawyers, GPL v3, and using emacs to write software I suspect there might be a fear (without standing?) that open source software + commercial hardware can somehow create an open source hardware product.   I have received legal instruction from a potential client to not use any GPL v3 software — not even emacs to edit text files — on their project because their fear it would make their product also GPL v3.  (I ended up not taking that contract.)

That sounded a bit odd to me at the time, but Apple is cleaning v3 (and v2) software from each release of OS X:
<http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/>.

--
J. Eric Townsend, IDSA
designer | engineer | fabricator
jet at functionalprototype.com
PGP 0x9D6F2CB8

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20160703/f6eb45a4/attachment.pgp>