Re: Mozilla Public License is non-free: stipulates court venue ?
On 2004-06-09 19:08:06 +0100 Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
I'm afraid that is a revisionist interpretation. First, Mozilla is
certainly intended to be "Open Source", which is essentially the same
as
what Debian means by "free":
The jury seems out on that. They could mean *anything* by "Open
Source". http://mjr.towers.org.uk/writing/ambigopen.html
Even assuming they mean OSI's OSD and not whatever fuzzy idea, OSI
seem to have a very different process to Debian and don't seem
concerned with the four freedoms at all. "OSI Certified" seems to mean
roughly "no-one found a flaw in the licence advocate's lawyer's
analysis that we couldn't help them patch up" while "DFSG-free" should
mean "there is rough consensus of debian-legal contributors that this
could be part of the debian OS distribution without violating the
debian social contract".
To the choice of venue problem, which I'm still not sure about:
Does the possibility of ruling by a distant court impact my freedom to
distribute the work? Definitely, if they can get and enforce a ruling
on me without having to prove their case or give me a reasonable
opportunity to defend myself.
Is the default to appear in my local court? I don't know, but it looks
like it from Articles 2 and 5.3 of the Brussels Convention on
Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial
Matters.
Why don't venue clauses fail common tests like "tentacles of evil"?
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ for creative copyleft computing
Help hack the EuroParl! http://mjr.towers.org.uk/proj/eurovote/
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