Chaincode Labs and Alex Morcos started with the legal intimidation in 2023, see the link about what I posted at the time.

So yes, when someone is forwarding you attorney’s letter to tell you obey to their will, you’re not going to send them flowers and chocolate in reply. You take the measures to defend yourself.

Be certain, going in front of legal courts among open-source developers it would be very saddening and it’s clearly not the open-source ethos. Sadly, it’s something that did happen in the past inside the Linux kernel, for stories about open-source licenses (beware it’s in German).

Talking about this subject in public is way to build more awareness among the community, and as such resolve or improve on the problems in a more informal way.

There is another rational about why going to the court early is an option.

When you work on security vulnerabilities search and corresponding coordinated disclosure, you have to work with folks spread on many countries, all under embargo and it’s a high bar to do things correctly. In the bitcoin space, I’ve been doing it for more than half a decade now, so I’ve a bit more of perspective on the subject.

Though, if something goes wrong in case of coordinated security disclosure, you’re reputation could be engaged, and that means for someone like me might have to spend a posteriori lot of time with things like the FBI, the CISA (the cyber agency, not the other service), the SEC or any other appropriate interlocutor to explain what effectively happened. And who played poor politics with a Github repository...

So yes in full frankness, if I have to the courts is a real option. I’m saving potential trouble to myself in the future.

However, ideally competent and veteran contributors are free to review and contribute a priori to complex technical changes on bitcoin core and as such limit the numbers of nights you have to do the acrobat in matters of embargoed coordinated security disclosure for bugs fixing. And I’m saying this with a lot of courtesy and politeness.