Re: BOSS is back ?? Seems like Yes !
at bottom :-
On 9/16/15, Abhilash Mhaisne <abhilashmhaisne@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am unable to understand how this works. If BOSS is derived from debian,
> it is ought to be free software. So, government of India and C-DAC can be
> sued by debian for violating the terms of free software. How can they
> "guard" the code?
<snipped>
Hi Abhilash,
For the record IANAL - I am not a lawyer, so whatever comes next is
just personal opinion.
It's a long way to think of suing anybody. For that to happen, first
of all Debian needs to register itself as a legal entity . The issue
can thought to be similar that happened between Debian-France and FSF
with Debian-France being a legal entity.
The second thing after that is we would need to show that efforts were
made on the Debian-India side to have good faith. AFAIK it's only
Jonas who made some special efforts. If other people did I am not
aware of those efforts.
Another thing to note is apart from all and any financial costs, such
suits would also have social costs. Would the social costs be ok with
everyone on the mailing list.
Even if that was in place, the second thing that we would need to do
is to have a firm which would take the case pro-bono. The only two
firms who are and would be ideologically suited for such a task would
be SFLC.in or/and altlawforum.org . These are the only two entities I
know who do know Intellectual Property Law well and think on the side
of FOSS as well as ideologically are near to the path we tread.
Once that is done, they probably would need to see if Statue of
Limitations does or does not come in our case. Statue of Limitations
is sort of a limitation where if you know a crime has been done and it
was not reported/sued then you cannot sue them. This is pretty well
both in European laws and American laws and did hear it is also
there/was coming in Indian law as well. In most countries and places
that limitation is for 5-7 years, at least that what I know/knew,
haven't checked for a long time.
If there is no statue of limitations issue and even if the case is
pro-bono, we would have to establish that multiple attempts were made
to have good faith restored as shared above.
Along with that, we would need to have evidence explicitly showing
that they acted in bad faith and violated the terms of license.
Also, we would need to figure out if we sue C-DAC or Govt. of India if
we have to go that way.
At the very end, even if we are able to file a suit, it will be a
long-drawn out experience where quite a few people apart from the
lawyers would have to run around and do unpaid labor work.
All in all, it would not be easy in any sense of the word.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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