Re: New BitTorrent License Preview
El martes, 4 de octubre de 2005 a las 11:26:03 -0500, Michael Janssen escribía:
Just a couple of comments:
In clause 3: "As an express condition for your use of the Licensed Product,
you hereby agree that you will not, without the prior written consent of
Licensor, use any trademarks, copyrights, patents, trade secrets or any
other intellectual property of Licensor or any Contributor except as
expressly stated herein. For the avoidance of doubt and without limiting the
foregoing, you hereby agree that you will not use or display any trademark
of Licensor or any Contributor in any domain name, directory filepath,
advertisement, link or other reference to you in any manner or in any
media."
Oh, a clause dealing with trademarks in a copyright license. And very
inconvenient, as well. This would forbid that the Debian package of
"BitTorrent" were called "bittorrent". We would have to call it
"binary-digit-violently-fast-stream-of-water" or something like that.
This is some piece of (not legal) advice from me: delete these (new to this
version) two sentences from the license, please.
From 4.g.: "For the avoidance of doubt, to the extent your executable
version of a Licensed Product does not contain your or another Contributor?s
material Modifications or is otherwise not a material Derivative Work, in
each case as contemplated herein, you may not sell, license or sublicense
for a fee, accept donations or otherwise receive compensation for such
executable."
Does this mean that I cannot sell it unless I or anyone else in the world
has modified it? Isn't that stipulation a bit stupid?
Moreover: "Additionally, without limitation of the foregoing and
notwithstanding any provision of this License to the contrary, you cannot
charge for, sell, license or sublicense for a fee, accept donations or
otherwise receive compensation for the Source Code."
This would mean, if a product covered under this license were included in
Debian, that nobody would then be allowed to sell Debian source CDs. That
would be a case of this product's license contaminating other software,
which is forbidden by DFSG#9, so this clause makes the license non-free.
Also, this would be a practical problem: in some places it is actually
cheaper and faster and more convenient to buy a Debian CD from a bookstore
or over the Internet than to download and burn it. That's why selling Debian
CDs is not only allowed: it is encouraged.
I love this piece in clause 13: "Any law or regulation that provides that
the language of a contract shall be construed against the drafter shall not
apply to this License." I am speechless.
--
Jacobo Tarrío | http://jacobo.tarrio.org/
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