[onli]

You are right, that's a shaky part and where insecurity is coming from - and sure, get a lawyer if you want more certainty. Depends where you are anyway. Better answers to that are already here. Just one thing:

> the original author didn't have the right to distribute it under the MIT license, so they (rails) never had a valid license.

Thing is, if it's really about a databasefile that was not copyrightable the gem author did have the right to distribute it. That's a happy circumstance of this specific case, making all of this less severe either way.