On 12/23/13 02:15, Steve Langasek wrote:
On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 12:25:40AM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:On Dec 22, Moritz Mühlenhoff <jmm@inutil.org> wrote:We should do that (and also reevaluate the position wrt OpenSSL) by running it by the Software Freedom Law Center.Red Hat has real lawyers who looked into the issue, we should do the same.Agreed, Debian has been promoting bad decisions due to developers playing armchair lawyers for way too long.Red Hat only needs to meet the standard that they don't think there's risk to the company of being sued for a license violation. Debian holds itself to a higher, ethical standard of complying with the license even when the risks are small. Your insulting reference to laymen who are capable of reading and reasoning about license terms as "armchair lawyers" doesn't magically make the text of the license ignorable.
I think a better way to put Marco's argument would be: "[h]acker legal education, with its roots in programming, is strong on formal precision and textual exegesis. But it is notably light on legal realism: coping with the open texture of the law and sorting persuasive from ineffective arguments".
That's from a commentary[1] by James Grimmelmann[2], that started from a review of Biella's book and discusses the legal education of hackers and members of the Debian community in particular. It's worth a read.
I, too, believe that we could use the reality check. We already did so with our patent policy and solved long-standing problems for our users.
Regards, Faidon1: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2013/09/hacker-legal-education.html 2: http://james.grimmelmann.net/ -- a professor of law specializing on copyright, IP & Internet Law, for what it's worth.