Re: Who can make binding legal agreements
On Wednesday 07 June 2006 06:11, Russ Allbery wrote:
> John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> > On Tue, Jun 06, 2006 at 07:43:10PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >> I think I lost a thread of the argument here. How does the acceptance
> >> into non-free of a package by the ftp-masters commit SPI to a legally
> >> binding agreement?
> >
> > The first paragraph of the license linked to by the original
> > announcement:
> >
> > SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. ("SUN") IS WILLING TO LICENSE THE JAVA PLATFORM
> > STANDARD EDITION DEVELOPER KIT ("JDK" - THE "SOFTWARE") TO YOU ONLY
> > UPON THE CONDITION THAT YOU ACCEPT ALL OF THE TERMS CONTAINED IN THIS
> > LICENSE AGREEMENT (THE "AGREEMENT"). PLEASE READ THE AGREEMENT
> > CAREFULLY. BY INSTALLING, USING, OR DISTRIBUTING THIS SOFTWARE, YOU
> > ACCEPT ALL OF THE TERMS OF THE AGREEMENT.
> >
> > I'd say we pretty clearly are distributing the software.
>
> You believe that it's pretty clear that *SPI* is distributing the
> software? Could you trace your reasoning here?
Nobody said that and you know it.
> > Nope, because now we are in the situation of Debian illegally
> > distributing software.
>
> *Debian* does not legally exist, and therefore cannot possibly be
> illegally distributing software.
I'm sorry, but that's really a poor agrument to stand after. Physically Debian
distributes that software and some is found to be illigally distributed or
the indemnify clause could be triggered in any way, then ligal actions could
be performed against <your options are, you guess>:
* the persons who actually put it there - no assets, so of no any interest for
them
* the first legal entity behind Debian having assests to indemnify them
p.s. remember SCO vs. IBM, not vs. single persons with no big assets to
provide.
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