On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 01:07:08AM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote: > Scripsit Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> > > On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 09:24:16PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote: > > > > It would be OK for the Sendmail people to say "if the user wants to > > > sue *us*, he must do it in SF" > > > I'm not really sure about that one. > > I think it would be free mainly because I cannot think of any > situation where the licensee would have any grievance (grounded in a > free license, anyway) to sue the licensor over. I can. The licensee might contribute non-trivial changes back to the work, and the licensor might claim that the license granted him the right to redistribute those changes under different terms entirely. You know, much as the QPL does. > Thus, the only suits that would be covered by such a clause would be > completely frivolous ones. I disagree. > I can symphatize with a licensor who does not wish to end up in a > *foreign* court as a result of writing software and giving it away. That's life. There are few completely risk-free activities. Personally, I'm more concerned about Microsoft getting copyright laws changed in the U.S. and other countries such that software distributed in source form at no charge is forbidden from disclaiming warranty, and perhaps even robbed of copyright protection altogether. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | kernel panic -- causal failure branden@debian.org | universe will now reboot http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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