[Alexx]

A software licence is a legal contract.

There are many things you can not indemnify yourself against - so indemnification against 'any consequences' is not possible.

Apple can not update their EULA for Apple pay, and avoid being held negligent if they messed up and all their customers money was stolen from their accounts. Otherwise every single EULA would make all software companies legally untouchable - which they aren't.

[forgotpwtomain]

> Apple can not update their EULA for Apple pay, and avoid being held negligent if they messed up and all their customers money was stolen from their accounts. Otherwise every single EULA would make all software companies legally untouchable - which they aren't.

This is very different, Apple are responsible not because they are providing you the software but because they are providing a service and that service involves transmission of funds and that scopes them to a completely different set of obligations. If I provide you with an open-source bitcoin-wallet under an MIT license and do not make claims of security or guarantees of any kind and you lose bitcoins due to security issues in said software - it's your own problem. That is in the former and later-case there is a clearly identifiable party which is providing the service, or in the later-case self-service.

With Ethereum it's much more of a gray-area, one could argue slock.it is only providing source-code and your choice to use it in a particular way (interacting with other users, the DAO) is done entirely at your own risk; though I'm not sure that interpretation would stand, since there definitely is a degree of centralized marketing by particular participants - and obviously non-compliance with SEC rules etc.

[Alexx]

I was just using an example to refute the claim that it's possible to indemnify software creators and users against 'any consequences' via a EULA. A EULA can not indemnify you against tort.

I think your example is convoluted. Free open source software has no contract. For a contract to be legally binding it must have consideration (exchange of goods / services / promises). This is not met.

EULAs and 'Software licences' (like MIT) are't the same thing. A EULA is a legal contract between the copyright holder and the end user, containing consideration, to which the user must agree. An open source licence such as MIT is just a declaration of permissions of use, and has no consideration.

So above it seems to me you are comparing having 'no contract' to 'a contract'.

But the DAO definitively has a contract, not a licence agreement.

Now, the DAO contract basically says 'no one can be held responsible for anything' - which in my opinion is a legal fantasy, contracts can not supersede the law. Regardless of the technological hoops in between, there are real people, with a binding contract - thus there can be tort.

I do accept when ever something new comes along and case law hasn't yet settled any technical loop holes there will always be debate, but I do think this looks pretty clean cut.