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Ask HN: Is shipping my companys branding in a MIT repo a legal risk?

3 points by aetherspawn ↗ HN
I am open sourcing a thing that my small company will "sponsor" development time towards every now and then. I made a doc/ folder and put our logo in it and put it at the bottom of the README.

The repo has an MIT license in the root folder and a note in the README to refer to that license.

Have I done something that's legally a problem, i.e. is my company's branding and name now MIT licensed?

2 comments

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brudgers
{I am not a lawyer. I am assuming that you have control of the company and not a random employee}

Hire an attorney now or hire an attorney later, maybe. Pay some now, or more later, maybe. The real issue isn't legality, it's risk. How much could it cost versus how likely it is.

Going a step further, anyone who is going to appropriate your branding in a way that hurts your company probably isn't going to worry too much about MIT...or rather they are not going to hire their own attorney to get an opinion that it is legal.

Or to put it another way, if it isn't worth hiring an attorney, it isn't really worth worrying about.

Good luck.