Re: BOINC: lib/cal.h license issue agree with the DFSG?
On Monday 04 January 2010 09:15:20 am Michael Poole wrote:
> Sean Kellogg writes:
>
> > You can object all you want. I'm not say that choice-of-venue clauses
> > are somehow "great"... just saying that aren't prohibited by the
> > DFSG. The DFSG does not give you everything you want, only what you
> > need :)
>
> The usual argument is that choice of venue violates DFSG #5 by
> discriminating against people who live outside the venue. Is there some
> tenable argument that these license actually don't discriminate against
> these users?
The discrimination clause is so very overblown on this list... it seems it is used to defend against any license clause these days. Heaven help us if the DFSG #10 didn't explicitly say the GPL was covered.
I don't consider choice-of-venue to be discrimination, it simple pre-determines a question that /must/ be answered before the a possible law suit can begin. That the decision is made to the disadvantage of the user isn't discrimination, it just /is/. But let's consider this clause for just a moment.
1) You download the code in some EU country and promptly violate the terms of the license (though, how you would actually violate them in a way they would pursue is really beyond me).
2) AMD brings suit against you in some US district court.
3) You decide the case is stupid and refuse to attend, as is your legal right.
4) A default judgment is entered against you for failure to show up for $1 million!!!
5) AMD can't do squat at this point. Unless the court that issued the judgment has control over assets you own, they can't actually do anything to you. So now AMD has to go and sue you at your home anyway.
But in those situations where the user does have assets under jurisdiction of the court in question, they have previously chosen to have some ties to that jurisdiction. And /now/ it really is a question of which venue, because both sides of interests to protect. As I stated before, we can either have venue pre-decided, or we can have a round of expensive legal briefs.
> (People have been known to overlook details in the past. The fact that
> some works currently in Debian have choice-of-venue license clauses does
> not in itself make those clauses DFSG-compliant.)
Except that this issue has been debated at length many times and has never, to my knowledge, resulted in a package being excluded. For my money, I don't think it's a case of overlooking.
-Sean
--
Sean Kellogg
e: skellogg@probonogeek.org
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