On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Tom Lane wrote:
> AFAICT, the footer in question tries to make it illegal for us even to
> have the message in our mail archives. If I were running the PG lists,
> I would install filters that automatically reject mails containing such
> notices, with a message like "Your corporate lawyers do not deserve to
> have access to the internet. Go away until you've acquired a clue."
I just noticed Bruce's email suggesting that this is going ahead:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2007-03/msg00098.php
I do not think this is a good idea. These disclaimer messages are
generally tacted on by the MTA of the company at which the person works,
as others have noted. There seem to be about 10 such emails to general per
month, not sure about other lists. FWIW, usually it is just one or two
offenders.
We do not suffer this problem in isolation. I think the Debian project has
tried to address this partly with this:
http://www.debian.org/MailingLists/disclaimer
Couldn't we place a disclaimer on the subscription page and welcome email
which says some of the interesting things in this disclaimer and says that
code contributions are implicitly licensed BSD. No idea about the legal
issues involved.
Another way of looking at this is that we cannot be 100% thorough. What
about disclaimers in German? What about false-positives?
Another concern I've had is that the assumption is that those wanting to
contribute (code) will just have to go register some throw away hotmail or
yahoo account. I think this will make tracing the origin of code more
difficult in the long term.
Just my thoughts.
Gavin
