Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote: > Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net>: > >>Good point about warranty disclaimers, though. Assuming you acquired >>the software lawfully, then you would have the right to use the >>software, and the right to sue the author if it didn't work, so this >>test as written would prohibit warranty disclaimers. > > A typical warranty disclaimer doesn't prohibit you from suing the > author; it just makes it less likely that you would win if you did. Good to know. I assumed that any attempted suit over software with a warranty disclaimer would be seen as meritless and thrown out immediately. > As I see it, the warranty disclaimer isn't a condition of the licence. > It's a notice. Usually there is a condition of the licence that > requires that notice to be preserved, but the disclaimer itself isn't > saying that you must do or this or must not do that if you distribute > the software. In particular, the GPL warranty disclaimer is presumably > supposed to have some kind of effect even if you don't copy the > software and therefore don't use the licence. That makes sense; I had assumed it was a license condition, but a notice makes more sense. That also explains why the BSD license says "list of conditions and the following disclaimer"; the disclaimer isn't a condition or a license clause. > Also, if anyone is going to get sued, isn't it more likely to be the > distributor than the author? I would guess that the disclaimer in the > GPL is of more value to Red Hat, say, than Joe Hacker, and I rather > suspect that the authors of the GPL had distributors rather than > authors in mind when they wrote that part. Not necessarily; Joe Hacker stands to lose far more than Red Hat, because Joe Hacker cannot necessarily afford a lawsuit. - Josh Triplett
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