Re: Mozilla Public License is non-free: stipulates court venue ?
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 10:30:09PM +0000, Jim Marhaus wrote:
> | With respect to disputes in which at least one party is a citizen of, or an
> | entity chartered or registered to do business in the United States of America,
> | any litigation relating to this License shall be subject to the jurisdiction of
> | the Federal Courts of the Northern District of California, with venue lying in
> | Santa Clara County, California, with the losing party responsible for costs,
> | including without limitation, court costs and reasonable attorneys' fees and
> | expenses.
Choice of venue aside, I question whether "if you sue me and lose, you pay me
my costs" is free. That might be a good policy for laws (or perhaps not; I'm
not very informed of the legal theory behind that), but I'm not sure if it
belongs in a free license.
> | If Contributor has knowledge that a license under a third party's intellectual
> | property rights is required to exercise the rights granted by such Contributor
> | under Sections 2.1 or 2.2, Contributor must include a text file with the Source
> | Code distribution titled "LEGAL'' which describes the claim and the party
> | making the claim in sufficient detail that a recipient will know whom to
> | contact. If Contributor obtains such knowledge after the Modification is made
> | available as described in Section 3.2, Contributor shall promptly modify the
> | LEGAL file in all copies Contributor makes available thereafter and shall take
> | other steps (such as notifying appropriate mailing lists or newsgroups)
> | reasonably calculated to inform those who received the Covered Code that new
> | knowledge has been obtained.
This fails the Chinese Dissident test.
--
Glenn Maynard
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