On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 04:07:07PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote: > > Am Dienstag, den 14.02.2006, 01:25 +0100 schrieb Joerg Schilling: > > > It seems that you did not understand the Debian rules.
> > Well, I believe I understand them quite well. OTOH, I don't consider > > this problem to be about my understanding, so let's drop this. > It sounds as if you definitely don't understand the legal background. > > > If Debian would really require people to be allowed to sue the > > > Author of free software at any place on the earth, Debian would > > > be anti-social. > > Well, you want a software, where every user on this planet can be forced > > to travel around the globe for a lawsuit. Doesn't sound much better. > This aplies _only_ to users who like to sue _me_, so this only aplies to > _BAD_ users. No. The wording in the CDDL is: Any litigation relating to this License shall be subject to the jurisdiction of the courts located in the jurisdiction and venue specified in a notice contained within the Original Software, with the losing party responsible for costs, including, without limitation, court costs and reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses. There is nothing in the CDDL that prevents *you* as a copyright holder from using this clause to harrass users you don't like. Exposing our users to this added risk in order to give copyright holders an additional legal protection that people have been doing fine without for decades is not a decision Debian is going to make lightly. Indeed, the list archives of debian-legal are full of in-depth discussion of this issue over the past year. > Conclusion: if Debian would act this way, Debian would be anti-social and > put the authors off Debian. As a later result, there would be no free > software anymore. Um, I call bullshit. There are thousands (millions?) of Free Software contributors who have no problem licensing their code under the terms of GPLv2 or the BSD licenses, and we have a long precedent of these software authors largely *not* getting sued frivolously by users. In contrast, licenses with choice of venue clauses are relatively new, and some of them have been advanced by corporations that have a history of overt hostility towards Free Software, so the risks to our users of being sued by copyright holders are a complete unknown. > Free Software is a curtesy of it's authors. If you take away all rights > from the authors, you loose anything you have. You know, some of us actually contribute to Free Software because we believe in its goals and its methods, not because we think we're doing users a favor... -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
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