@neil

Perhaps start a blog, and discuss instructional cases or scenarios that would resonate?

Virtually everyone needs to understand the law better. Anyone who can make it approachable would be doing a terrific service to society.

@neil Is there a way projects could make requests for legal assistance that exceeds the requirements for ethical behavior?

(related - in my head I see parallels between this, and p[rojects needing to do a better job with direct outreach for accessibility and usability)

@neil What do you think open source projects should be doing to help invite this kind of help? Make an explicit post asking for broad, general legal advice? Add some post simply inviting legal counsel if it's free?

@neil can i ask you wholesale to please share your advice if you see me running in the wrong direction?
thank you so much for your public work. we have not interacted much, but i highly appreciate what you do.

@neil @evacide sounds like you should have a chat with this guy.

@neil Would suggesting seeking advice without advertising yourself as a service work? Has the issue of the project probably will:
Not have the funds to pay for it so sadly ignore it.
If they see you are a lawyer and ask, it could still be seen as you still initating the advise.

@neil Would it be a problem if you wrote an short article about common issues you see in open source projects that might benefit from a bit of legal advice? Because maybe that would help more projects to realize they might need a bit of help

@neil

I am not familiar with the specific laws, but from the way other lawyers advertise themselves I believe the following is either legal, or the rules against it are not enforced:

You can write posts on your web site giving broad advice for categories of problems, with a clear notice that this is something that may have nuance and that someone with these problems needs to talk to a lawyer. And you can then put something on that post with an offer of free advice for small community projects.

@neil Well as part of a free software project who asked for your advice, I'd say you're very approachable.

Incase there's some shy free software folks who'd like to ask you for help.

@neil "unless someone is explicitly asking about legal advice / looking for help"

Should everyone add a line to their README templates that pro bono legal advice from solicitors is welcome, then?

@neil

Wouldn't the "free" part of it make a difference between ambulance chasing?

@neil Count me as one of the folks who doesn't know if legal advice is something I should be looking for. I've got a web component that adds interactivity to pages. I've got an MIT license on it. I added line to it that the license include an ID along with the rest of the license text. If you've got spare cycles I'm curious to know what impact, if any, that has.

(the component itself doesn't have any telemetry functions or collect any data. I expect there's no issue there. But, yeah, I don't know what I don't know.)

@nemobis @neil I ran a multidisciplinary research group for a while and after interactions with @lilianedwards and hanging out at #Gikii hired a series of law postdocs as I realised all projects at least needed to ask a lawyer if there was something that we needed to pay attention to. There was always something…

@neil yes I think that's very fair and wise. Perhaps the issue is a more wider issue of computing becoming more regulated and FOSS projects being blindsided by legislation.
As someone cleverly put adding a legal initation paragraph asking for advise in the readme could be a step to engage lawyers and projects. Perhaps wider recognition is also needed for the need to have legal advise now.

@neil

I haven’t seen you post things from your blog here. That might help, since a lot of your target audience are probably one boost away. And it’s the kind of thing a lot of people here would boost if the offer of free legal advice for small projects doing X is clearly visible.

@neil Makes sense, even though the rules might not. 😄