Professional Insurance

[Bob Gorman]

At 10:27 AM 11/24/2004, markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
>... some sort of indemnity ...

Indemnity as a term is very imprecise. You need to determine what you wish to indemnify them from and how much and under what terms and conditions.  If you mean general purpose business insurance or a form of liability insurance, any agent can give you that.  That covers fire, theft, workers compensation and usually things like if you accidently damage something or someone while working for them. Which is probably what they want.  Ping me next week and I can give you copy of my Certificate of Insurance that I provide to customers. 

>... with all the crap with software patents and copyright changes.

If you are selling them a software product license (proprietary) that you wrote and own then it is normal that you indemnify the customer from these issues.  If it is services you are selling such as installing/configuring software that you did not create (open source) then you can't feasibly indemnify them from these issues.  Big companies like IBM and Novell can take this on, but not small one person businesses.  You can deflect some of the open source issues by having the client buy a 'license' from another company such as RedHat.

Hope that helps.

I'm off on vacation now, so no replies from me if a grand debate stirs from this thread.


-- 

I deliver custom Linux business applications in the Boston area.
mailto:bob(at)rsi.com, http://www.rsi.com/, 617.965.1700