Re: issues with the AGPL
On Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:51:14 +1100
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Greg Harris <glharris@panix.com> writes:
>
> > (It ought to be remembered that contracts (including licenses) …
>
> Whoa. Since when is a copyright license considered a contract?
> Contracts require multipartite negotiation; I can't negotiate the
> terms of a software license in most cases.
>
> Free-software licenses especially are (by definition) unilateral
> grants of permission, so I can't see how you lump them under contract.
>
Um, no. Software licenses are one instance of a class of unilateral
contracts. Another instance is product warranties. Yet another class is
a store's advertised prices for goods. There are others.
In (somewhat) formal terms, the offeror proposes terms that the offeree
may accept through some act of performance. Negotiation is not
required. The parties need not engage in any communication at all. If
you deposit the requisite coinage into a vending machine and a beverage
is not delivered, the vendor has breached a contract with you. The
warranty for your television is a contract. So are software licenses.
In various disputes about shrink-wrapped EULAs, one of the issues was
whether the consumer could have "accepted" the terms of the agreement
without those terms being available before purchase of the box. At the
other end of the spectrum, there are software licenses that are heavily
negotiated and involve substantial monetary terms.
Writing a bit of CSS and designing a kernel filesystem may be more
different in some ways than they are alike, but at some level of useful
abstraction they are both instances of coding and share certain
fundamental attributes. Reality has a way of jostling our
preconceptions.
Cheers.
Reply to: