Re: [Fwd: Debian and CDDL and DFSG]
On Thursday 10 August 2006 01:07, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> wrote:
> > Nobody can or will *stop* someone else from lying. But the liar can
> > face penalties from the legal system: sanctions; liability for
> > malicious prosecution and/or perjury; for the lawyer, potential
> > disbarment. These go away if the license explicitly permits one side
> > to be evil in this way.
>
> And choice of venue makes absolutely no difference here. Either the
> licensor is evil (in which case they'll end up losing and having to pay
> damages, providing that the licensee has had sufficient money to pay for
> the entire costs of the case) - or the licensor is correct in their
> lawsuit, in which case choice of venue merely lets them defend
> themselves more sensibly.
The venue could make significant difference here, because the licensor could
be terribly wrong in one jurisdiction and correct in another. Furthermore you
can hadly measure whether the licensor is evil or not, and can not just rely
on his good faith. That why I believe that everyone (licensors and licensees)
should be subject to his own jurisdiction, which they know best, and it is
jurisdiction's (or state's) job to deal with legislation differences,
bipartite agreements, repatration if necessary and so forth. Having that
specified in the license inselt as a patch clause (act in an arbitrary
manner) leaves room for speculations. This kind of 'moving sands' via patch
clauses are quite similar to GFDL's invariant sections which Debian considers
non-free.
And yes, I don't think that CDDL license creators are evil and made that on
purpose, instead I believe that they've made an unwitting mistake which will
probably be corrected in the next version of the license, or at least I hope
so.
> Discriminating against choice of venue has no significant cost to evil
> licensors, but hurts wronged licensors.
That could depend on various circumstances.
P.S. IANAL, but I discussed that with a friend of mine which is a lawyer.
Since the lawyers tend to be conservative beasts, I challenge you to do the
same.
--
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