Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...
Scripsit Paul TBBle Hampson <Paul.Hampson@anu.edu.au>
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 02:30:05PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
>> 9. MISCELLANEOUS.
>> Any law or regulation which provides that the language of a contract
>> shall be construed against the drafter shall not apply to this License.
> Can a license exclude application of laws?
A contract can certainly contain guidance for the interpretation of
its text, and such guidance will usually be heeded (say, it is *very*
common to have a sequence of explicit definitions somewhere in a
contract). Especially in the area of contract law there is often a
legal ground rule that the parties can jointly agree to whatever legal
relation between themselves they find reasonable, and many statutes
define themselves as being relevant only in case the parties have not
explicitly agreed to a different resolution.
I agree that this particular exclusion is not likely to have any
effect in the majority of jurisdictions. It even supplies a wide space
for a court to ignore it, as it does not precisely charaterize the
principle of interpretation it presumably is meant to target. The
usual principle is that *ambiguities* (not simply all language) in a
contract should be interpreted in favor of the non-drafter, because
the drafter was the party who had the opportunity to clarify the
ambiguity in the first place.
--
Henning Makholm "There were few families that didn't have at least
one hopeful who, from Reading Day on, was the great
hope because of the way he handled his trisyllabics."
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