Re: Choice-of-Venue is OK with the DFSG.
On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 10:29:45PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Even though this is a tangent point, Free Software involves defending
> > the rights of a user of Free Software. If the upstream author wants to
> > protect and preserve their rights, they are interested in proprietary
> > software, not Free Software.
>
> Protection against users not respecting the licence and reusing GPLed code in
> proprietary software for example ?
Enforcing copyright is entirely the job of the law and the courts, not
Debian.
If what you were trying to suggest is that the purpose of the GPL is to
protect and preserve the original author's rights, then you're missing
the point of the GPL. The primary purpose of the GPL is to protect the
user: to ensure that he always receives the right and the ability to modify
and redistribute the software. The author's rights are also protected,
but that's because the author is also a user; just as other user's rights
are protected and preserved by the GPL, so are his own.
Protecting the rights of the original author is fine, until it infringes
upon the rights of the user; at that point, the tradeoff needs to be
carefully examined. "Don't claim that I endorse your use of this software"
protects the author[1], and that's fine--it doesn't restrict users' rights,
or put users in danger. "If you use this software, you must agree to never
sue me for any reason" protects the author, and it's not acceptable at all,
since it infringes upon the users' rights.
"Any litigation related to this software will take place in New York" may
protect the author, but can also be used by the copyright holders to harass
users in the same way the author is trying to protect himself against. It's
not at all clear that this is acceptable. If it's significant enough for
the author to want protection, then surely putting every user (which
includes other free software developers, reusing code or forking, who live
in other parts of the world) at the same risk is a dubious trade.
[1] kind of; you can't do that anyway, so it's usually a no-op
--
Glenn Maynard
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