[debian-devel dropped, way off topic there] On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 07:37:30PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: > > In the case you're worrying about (obnoxious large businesses suing > > people in order to intimidate them), the difference in cost is > > unlikely to deter them. > The point is that the cost *for me* of defending myself is much more > favourable. Actually, consider real-world examples such as the DeCSS case, where the plaintiff sued a large number of defendants from all over the world in their home court in California. The plaintiff's expenses in this case are proportional to the number of defendants who fight for a separate trial, they are *not* proportional to the number of people being sued. A slight shift in the costs of bringing individual suits can therefore have a substantial impact on leveling the legal playing field. > > The DFSG are not holy writ, but how about if I phrase it as > > discrimination against licensors without money? > That wouldn't make your argument more coherent. We're concerned > exclusively with which rights the *user* gets. Whether the author > thinks it is worth it to give the user those rights is not something > we consider at all. We can just observe that sufficiently many > software authors *have* been willing to do so that we can put together > a good free OS. There is no reason to start including software in our > OS where the user only gets freedoms with this kind of strings > attached. Well, I don't think we should be drawing lines that require licensors to give up rights unrelated to the work being distributed. But I also don't think that bypassing the standard rules on jurisdiction is a "right" in the first place, and I don't think licensors should be claiming that privilege as part of Free Software licenses. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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