legal insurance for developers

[Daniel Pocock]

Hi all,

There has been some discussion recently about Software Freedom
Conservancy's announcement about their ability to defend licenses[1]

Has anybody looked at any legal insurance policies that may allow
developers to protect their rights under the GPL and other licenses?

There are many freelancers out there (authors, photographers, musicians,
etc) who probably have somewhat similar needs so it occurred to me that
there may already be insurance companies offering services for this type
of risk.

I looked at the FAQ about the VMware case[2] and it leaves a lot of
questions unanswered, for example, it is not clear if Conservancy would
have the funds to pay costs to VMware if the case fails or if they run
out of funds to pursue the case.  Sometimes risks like that can be
insured against too but with a legal insurance policy it is often a
standard part of the insurance.

Regards,

Daniel

1. https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/
2. https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html