Bug#760592: ITP: bsdowl -- bmake macros for building OCaml projects, TeX projects, and more
Hi Andrew,
thank you for your quick answer:
On 5 Sep 2014, at 19:55, Andrew Shadura wrote:
> I also see you used to distribute this piece of software under 3-clause
> BSD license. What's wrong with it, why have you decided to switch?
There are several problems with the classical GPL and BSD licenses, to put it shortly they are US-centric and may not work well in other countries, especially the “no warranty” clause.
I am myself not myself a lawyer, and the sentence above is merely the conclusion of lawyers working for the CEA, CNRS and INRIA, three major french research facilities which enjoy worldwide a good reputation in their respective specialities.
There is a very nice website holding important informations about the CeCILL licenses, you may want to visit it or show it to other persons:
http://www.cecill.info/faq.en.html#gpl
I have read carefully the provided information and the arguments exposed by these lawyers, and decided to trust them. For your convenience I will sum up that information according to my understanding:
* Classical licenses (GPL&Co.) do not specify applicable rights to use when solving disagreements or disputes between licensees and licensors, so that a licensee located in Mongolia could sue the licensor in a court in Mongolia and because of the lack of applicable right specification, the court in Mongolia can declare itself a competent jurisdiction. With CeCILL, the parties agreed on French jurisdiction and declared the French Court in Paris competent — but are free to agree on another court and another jurisdiction if they are willing to.
* Classical licenses have a “no warranty” clause which is not legal in France and probably in Europa, it is even explicitly forbidden in the case of software. Thus, instead of keeping the licensor from damage liabilities, they actually expose the licensor to be liable for any damage caused by the software and almost without limitation. CeCILL provides a frame for a sane liability.
(See “Quelle est ma responsabilité si un logiciel dont j'ai concédé la licence provoque un dommage ?” in the French version of the FAQ.)
Also, there is some software of great importance licensed under a CeCILL license, namely Scilab, which is already part of Debian.
> By the way, it would be cool if you could integrate your makefiles to
> mk-configure (or make them compatible with it), so mk-configure users
> can benefit from them.
That would be pretty cool indeed (but I love programming in M4), I opened a ticket for this in my backlog.
--
Regards,
Michael
Reply to: