Re: [Fwd: Debian and CDDL and DFSG]
MJ Ray wrote On 2006-08-09 15:23,:
Martin Man <Martin.Man@Sun.COM> wrote:
I do understand it in this way:
- c-o-v as required by paragraph 9. of CDDL is "a note attached to the
license itself", to my understanding you can put there any jurisdiction
you want (you "as the author or contributor"), and yes, it's there to
predict and ensure that case will be treated properly (according to the
state of law in a jurisdiction you put to the clause)
- GPL does not have such c-o-v clause at all, which means that I can
take anyone to any court I decide to, so to me, if I want to sue you,
GPL gives me even more chance to manipulate the case and choose the
jurisdiction that will give me most advantages in my case.
You're justifying choice of law. I can understand the benefits of
choice of law, which can help make the licences more predictable.
I do not understand why you need choice of venue. Unless we know how
that venue treats absent defendants, any ambiguous terms in the licence
and some other things, it looks rather like a licensor trying to get
some advantage, such as being able to use their usual legal team against
a smaller defendant and stopping that defendant being judged by their
own state's people when appropriate. As you note, it isn't usual for
free software licences to specify venue, as there are other agreements
which do that. Why is choice of venue needed?
IANAL, and I have not designed CDDL, but as I understand it, choice of
venue in CDDL == choce of law, don't know whether it would have been
enough from the lawyer's perspective to put in the license
"[any litigations] ... will be held by any jurisdiction in USA..."
an interesting question by itself, I'll try to seek the answer by
questioning our experts.
The particular choice of Santa Clara County, California for opensolaris
scares me - after all, it's where Adobe of freesklyarov.org fame chooses
as venue for its licence disputes. But opensolaris isn't up for
inclusion in debian itself, is it? What CDDL package is under
discussion here?
the original package in question was cdrtools by Joerg Schelling, Joerg
was claiming that debian refuses to upgrade to a newer version of his
sources because of CDDL, and because I could not believe his statement,
I'm trying myself to get the information clarified (FYI: debian stable
of course ships latest available stable cdrtools)
but more generally, the code at opensolaris.org (not necessarily kernel)
is and will be probably mostly licensed under CDDL, because CDDL is
more commercial friendly than GPL (pretty much the same way as APL is),
so my question was about any code that is CDDL and might be useful for
debian (SMF[1] comes to my mind as an example)
I await your reply with interest.
Regards,
thanx,
Martin
[1] http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/smf/
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