Re: [bmc@it.larc.nasa.gov: Proposal]
Clint Guillot writes:
> Once a maintainer has made any statement about the legality of a package
> in a given country, some bonehead will try to sue him as a responsible
> party when someone installs his package, unwittingly breaking some
> hitherto unknown law.
Seems pretty unlikely to me. First, the maintainer and the potential
plaintiff are guaranteed to be in different countries. Do you really
believe that anyone is going to file an international lawsuit over this?
Second, I know of no legal theory that would consider the maintainer liable
in such a case. It would be laughed out of court. Third, maintainers are
far more likely to be sued over copyright or bugs. Hasn't happened yet so
far as I know.
> Unfortunately, the current scheme does what it's supposed to do: protect
> the mirror operators.
So would my proposal.
> The US is probably one of the few countries with the spare time and spare
> change (mostly mine, I think) to chase down folks who encrypt their email
> to mom..
"chase down folks who encrypt their email"? What are you talking about?
> So seperating out non-us makes sense for the mirror operators, and
> imposes no legal responsibiltiy on the maintainers...
Any legal theory that held a maintainer liable for failing to warn the user
about legal restrictions would hold the mirror operator liable for
misclassifying it.
Drake Diedrich writes:
> I don't think we'll be able to build a completely reliable permissions
> database: 200 nations, millions of laws and patents, thousands of
> packages, hundreds of maintainers - even if we construct a fairly
> complete database there will still be errors.
I don't see that we need to. We just need to make sure that our servers
are legal and that others can easily generate legal mirrors and CD's. If
we put servers in the US, Japan, Britain, and Germany how many entries
would the restrictions file would have? Maybe a dozen or so?
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org (John Hasler)
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI
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