[off topic] multi-lingual contracts (was Re: Time for some Clarity (KDE, Qt, Open Source...)

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> What if the contract is in spanish? can the french compnay then break it 
> with legal impunity? DO they need to draw up all of the contracts in both
> languages and sign ALL copies? 

Having done a certain amount of legal contract stuff between Britain and Spain,
you just have to have everything in both languages, and you get to pay
expensive bi-lingual lawyers, who have qualifications that are accepted in both 
countries, to rubber stamp the translation as a true and valid translation, at 
several hundred pounds per rubber stamp :-(

This topic is pointless BTW, unless someone wants to cough up a few hundred 
pounds for a translator, a few more for a local copyright lawyer to check that 
the result is a valid copyleft in the target country, and then a few more for 
the rubber stamp, and then multiply that by the number of countries in 
question (lets say the best part of $10,000 to cover Europe, what about the 
rest of the world ?  Who's copyright law holds in Antarctica ?)

Meanwhile, there still has been no test case to prove that the GPL is worth 
anything in the USA, let alone anywhere else.

Cheers, Phil.



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