Re: CDDL, OpenSolaris, Choice-of-venue and the star package ...

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
> Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> wrote:
>> Scripsit Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

>>> The licensor *already* has carte blanche to harrass licensees with
>>> fivolous lawsuits.

>> No - if the court throws out the case ex officio because of lack of
>> jurisdiction, no harassment results.

> Eh? They can sue you in your jurisdiction.

Yes they can. But that gives me excellent chances to convince the
court that the case is devoid of merit - *without* having to spend a
fortune and tons of time on travel.

> 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.

>> According to your argument, the GPL and BSD license must be pointless,
>> because they don't contain any obnoxious choice-of-venue clauses.

> If the licensor doesn't have enough money to enforce them, then yes, I
> think they're pointless. What's the point of a license that you can't
> enforce?

In the free software world, the point of having a license is to
*allow* others to use, share and extend your software.

> 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.

-- 
Henning Makholm                           "I always thought being *real* sad
                                        would be *cooler* than acting *fake*
                                 sad, but it's not. It's not cool at *all*."