Re: QPL non-DFSG compliance? What future for OCaml in Debian?

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 04:21:57PM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
> Sven Luther writes:
> 
> > The exact text of the licence is :
> >
> >                             Choice of Law
> >
> >   This license is governed by the Laws of France.  Disputes shall be
> >   settled by the Court of Versailles.
> >
> > So this means that it is a question of choice of law rather than choice of
> > venue. The second phrase though would also mention choice of venue right,
> > altough i have not clear understanding of the exact meaning of the "shall"
> > verb. Furthermore, it seems that accordying to french law, the choice of venue
> > is in the domicil of the defendant, at least in principle, which would make
> > this second point void. Not sure though if there is not a special case to be
> > applied to the software licence, or the international reach of this case
> > though.
> 
> At least in US contract law, the second sentence is a valid way to
> choose venue for contract disputes.  For a free license, I do not know
> if it would be binding in a common law country, but I would imagine
> that it would be binding in a civil law country such as France.
> 
> To elaborate:
> 
> The rules for personal jurisdiction (where you can be sued in the US)
> generally say that you have to live, be headquartered, or do business
> in the district where someone files suit against you.  It sounds like,
> that far, French law is the same.
> 
> That can be overridden by contract and perhaps other agreements; I do
> not know whether a unilateral license grant is sufficient to do that.
> Without a meeting of the minds, a US court would not consider a
> unilateral grant to be a binding contract, but there may be some other
> basis for a court to accept the clause.
> 
> Civil law countries define and treat contracts differently than common
> law countries.  I'm not a lawyer, much less one specializing in
> international law, so I can't very well say how valid that clause
> would be in France.  My guess is that since contracts are more broadly
> defined in those countries, it would be binding on licensees.

Ok, sounds reasonable, altough i am no lawyer, and really would very much
prefer to be bugfixing than all this non-sense.

Still, if the choice of venue is binding, does this make it non-free or not ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther