Re: FWD: Analog licence violates DFSG
Scripsit Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net>
> On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Joey Hess wrote:
> > 1.Any action which is illegal under international or local law is
> > forbidden by this licence. Any such action is the sole
> > responsibility of the person committing the action.
> > This provision of the licence blatently violates section 6 of
> > the DFSG which states:
> I don't follow; maybe I'm just being dense, but section 1 seems like a
> no-op to me,
It is not. Consider this scenario:
A is a citizen of [insert your favorite evil oppresive police state].
He happens to use this software to speek his mind against the
government, is persecuted by the authorities but escapes narrowly to
the free world. All is well, or not? No, because he not only broke
the local laws, he also broke the license of the software. Then
the author of the software might sue A for breach of contract, even
though A is outside of the jurisdiction of the local laws that he
broke originally.
That certainly discriminates against fields of endeavor, namely
against any field of endeavor that is illegal anywhere.
> a cover-your-ass by the attorney who wrote it to cover the
> case where a jurisdiction may decide that another clause in the license
> contradicts some law somewhere, thus rendering the license void
That is a possible explanation of what they *thought* they wrote,
but is not what they *actually* wrote. A much better wording would
be:
| Licensee takes note that local laws may limit his exercise of the
| rights granted by this License Agreement. Licensor does not
| encourage the any activities that are against applicable local
| law, and assumes no responsibility for any consequence of such
| actions.
This would be DFSG-free.
--
Henning Makholm "Manden med det store pindsvin er
kommet vel ombord i den grønne dobbeltdækker."
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