Folks,
As announced at the last Wineconf, Jeremy and myself have been working for a few months now with the Software Freedom Law Center on a number of legal issues concerning Wine. We've been mostly quiet about it, so I thought I'd post a status update. There are two major tasks going on at the moment:
1. Code audit
We are doing an audit of the code base, to make sure we have proper records of all contributions, and spot any potentially troublesome code. The goal is to be able to show to people who don't want to dig through the source that we have done our development properly, and that they can use Wine without fear of legal trouble.
Currently, a survey is being sent out to people we have identified as major contributors, so that we can collect some information from them, like employers, license agreements, that sort of thing. This will enable us to build a complete track record for all contributions.
We are still processing the results, at this point the responses we received cover approximately half of the code base (many thanks to everybody who took the time to answer!). We'll be sending the survey to more contributors in the near future to try to get as close to 100% coverage as we can.
2. Non-profit organization
There are many advantages to having a non-profit organization for a project, for instance to allow tax-exempt donations, or hold assets like trademarks. However it's a lot of paperwork to do, so we never went to the trouble of setting one up.
Now the SFLC is starting an organization called the Software Freedom Conservancy, that will be officially launched on Monday. It's basically an umbrella non-profit that provides services to free software projects. By joining that organization, we will get all the advantages of having our own non-profit, without having to do any of the work, so that seems like a good deal...
There will also be the possibility of assigning our copyrights to that organization, which would make it easier to enforce the license, and provide some liability protection for developers. However this will only be done if most developers are comfortable with it, so I'd be interested to hear your feedback on this issue.