Re: UCITA bans GPL
On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Raul Miller wrote:
> Note that the UCITA is not law, and there's a lot of people who think it
> would be a bad idea for it to be made law (attorney generals of about half
But there are a lot of people that think it should be made law - such as
the Virginia state legislature.
> Note that the UCITA makes it legal to hide the terms of an agreement
...
Oh yes, there are many flaws with UCITA. Many many flaws. I'm not
arguing the relative merits of UCITA - I'm pretty sure that just about
everybody here already knows just how bad it really is.
I'm curious why the MPAA opposes it. It seems like they wouldn't really
stand to lose anything?
> > I believe that this law could be construed as banning distribution of GPL
> > software. This is good!
>
> How does this benefit you?
In places where discussion has been closed (i.e. Virginia) it gets the
legislators to realize they just passed a very bad law. In any case, we
don't want GPL software distributed in a place where the authors can be
made monetarily liable for trivial problems with their software.
BTW: I don't believe that even the anti-discussion aspects of UCITA would
be ruled unconstitutional, since it is not the government that would be
setting the standards for when things can or cannot be discussed. It
would simply make it very easy for a corporation to obtain NDA-strength
restrictions on their end users.
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