Re: APSL Hidden Nasty's
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> A more serious question is whether a minor can license his own work without
> his guardian's consent. I don't think he can. I think that a court would
> rule that in doing so he is giving up valuable rights and that he is not
> competent to make the decision to do so. It is probable that a license
> (free or not) granted by a minor is void unless he gets his guardian's
> permission.
>
> Boy, I hope that doesn't invalidate all the code (and copyright
> assignments) I wrote for FSF and Debian before I turned 18 :-)
no, because you haven't changed your mind yet... that's probably an
implicit statement that you still want it to be under the current
license, or something. it's also a matter of practice rather than
theory, and for what it's worth, i could (read: did) take out very
hefty student loans when i was fifteen, and those were -definitely-
contracts, and i signed them and everything. granted this doesn't
actually make it legal and i wouldn't base the dfsg on it ;)
however, according to jules we minors can agree to licenses... that
means apsl is definitely violating the discrimination clause by
locking it away from us. also, the argument that bruce, wichert, and
ian (but not necessarily in that order) made about the requiring us to
report changes to apple via a specific url and thus possibly making
the license nonfree when apple folds, which was correctly rebutted by
osi, is -not- the reason that clause is bad; it's bad because it
forces us to report changes period. we shouldn't be required to do
*anything*. if we have to notify anyone, right now, it's non
free. ditto if we have to make it available gratis by electronic
download... basically all of 2.2(b) and (c). further, the osi rebuttal
to the revocation on patent lawsuit clause is an absolute lie. there's
nothing in 12.1(c) that says 'affected original code'. and i'm not too
happy about anything in section 3, 5, 10, 11, or most of 13, either,
though it's probably not going to disqualify the license. (10 is
particularly distressing because it's not really clear if i'm allowed
to call my modified versions of apple product foobar apple product
foobar, or if i have to say it's something else). now i understand
that the apsl is a product of lawyeritis and that the apple guys seem
to be genuinely interested in fixing it, but if they're to continue
using the term open source, they really must remove those non-free
clauses.
</rant>
- --phouchg
"Reasoning is partly insane" --Rush, "Anagram (for Mongo)"
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