Re: BOSS is back ?? Seems like Yes !

[Pirate Praveen <praveen@onenetbeyond.org>]

On १६ सप्टेंबर, २०१५ २:३४:५९ [PM] IST, "shirish शिरीष" <shirishag75@gmail.com> wrote:
>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.

Its not about legal status, but copyright ownership. Debian does not have copyright to all software we distribute. If we know any specific software license is violated, the upstream authors can file a case.

But I think it was just the journalist not understanding Free Software.The

>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 .

SFLC will promise you things, but it is never going to do anything. Two past experiences.

1. poddery.com terms and conditions
2. Suing HP for forcing Windows on laptops

Both did not happen, no hope of going to happen.

> 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.

We are not in the picture. Who are we? Members of this list?

>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.

It is not the question of easy or hard. If we know they have violated any license we can approach people who will take it forward. We can approach gpl-violations.org

But before anything, we have to find out if there is any violation at all. Lets wait for a BOSS release.
-- 
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