Re: ocaml, QPL and the DFSG: Choice of venue argumentation.
On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 02:16:35PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 05:32:24PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Ok, still do you think that a judge would have no consideration if the
> > defendent is a poor student on the other side of the world, or otherwise has
> > not the physical means to be present ?
>
> You believe it's ok to assume all French judges are nice people?
>
> You would be a terrible legislator.
>
> > But again, the DFSG makes no provision whatsoever for this kind of things.
>
> So in general, you believe it's ok to inflict all kinds of risks on
> users who exercise their rights on software in main, so long as the DFSG
> doesn't explicitly prohibit them?
No, but these are hypothetical risks which i have some doubts will happen.
Like they say here, 0-risk is impossible to obtain, there will always be some
risk. Still the DFSG are our guidelines for what we consider free, if lawsutis
are part of it, we need to add a new DFSG entry about it, and go through the
voting and 3:1 majority requirement and everything.
Or clearly add a note to the DFSG that we feel free to add any random
additional constraint at our whim.
> Forget these inane arguments about what the DFSG does or doesn't
> prohibit; why would we WANT to expose our users to licenses like this?
Why not ? And do you consider seriously that the risk involved is a real one ?
Or just empty speculation ?
> I can't see any reason that you feel this way other than your personal
> investment of time in these packages.
Yeah, over 6 years of packaging effort of not only me, but of the small ocaml
packager team, not to speak almost one week of almost full time debian-legal
participation :/
But the main point here, is the risk real, or are we just imagining it ? And
even if upstream would end up crazy and do suing harasment or whatever you
fear, are you really sure that this choice of venue clause will have so much
of an incidence that it over balances the benefit of having ocaml in
debian/main over it ? And i suppose we will also have to kick it from non-free
as well, since the risk to our non-free users would be the same.
I propose a moratorium on this theme until we are able to get legal advice on
the subject. Which will not be before monday in any case.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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