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UCITA, Licen[cs]e wrangling (was Re: Python 2.0b1 is released!)

Paul Wright paul-wright at verence.demon.co.uk
Tue Sep 12 18:47:39 EDT 2000 
In article <39BDDBF6.DFA954B4 at seebelow.org>,
Grant Griffin  <g2 at seebelow.org> wrote:
>Paul Wright wrote:
>> This from <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ucita.html>
>> "UCITA will allow the publishers to impose the most outrageous
>> restrictions on you. They could change the license retroactively at any
>> time, and force you to delete the material if you don't accept the
>> change. They could even prohibit you from describing what you see as
>> flaws in the material."
>> 
>> So, you're not only trusting CNRI now, but in perpetuity (or at least
>> until UCITA is suceeded by something else).
>...
>
>I can't help but point out that in believing that interpretation, you
>are trusting the FSF.  I don't really know whether or not their
>intrepretation on this issue is fair or accurate, but like any
>self-respecting iconoclasts, they definitely have a bias here that one
>should be aware of.

That's true, but the FSF has probably had the UCITA looked over by
real lawyers, and I've no reason to believe they'd lie outright about
what the effect of UCITA is. Although, as we've seen with the Python
licence, lawyers can disagree.

>But have you ever noticed that software licenses seem to be largely
>academic anyway?  Here's what I have observed:
...
>But specifically in the case of free/open software it is unlikely that
>one would lose any kind of "implied warranty" lawsuit: if the software
>was both free and open, the plaintiff would seemingly have a hard time
>explaining why he thought you owed him money when it didn't work as he
>intended, and when he was welcome and invited to fix it.

I'm pretty sure that, under British law, the fact that free software is
given away without charge means that a lot of the consumer protection
law doesn't apply.

I'm not as sure that free software is exempt from the law on negligence:
ISTR that if someone who owes someone else else a duty of care and their
failure in that duty caused damage to the other person, the first person
can be sued for negligence.  I'm not sure what effect disclaimers have
on negligence. Negligence may be one of those things for which a
disclaimer is ineffectual or even illegal in itself (as is an attempt
have the buyer disclaim their statutory rights for goods which are sold,
ISTR), or it may actually help matters by warning the user that he's
getting something free with no guarantees.

...
>As another example, if you include a little GPL'ed code in a program
>you distribute as an executable, there isn't much to force you to
>follow the terms of the GPL; it's pretty unlikely that anybody will
>discover this grave slight to the Noble Cause of Freedom, and it's even
>_more_ unlikely that anybody will come after you for doing it. 

Hmm... It may be unlikely that you'll be discovered (although someone
(BeOS?) was found distributing the Electric Fence debugger, even though
it was only distributed as a binary), but once you are (and if it gets
out in the usual forums), you'll certainly be DoS'd by hundreds of
Slashdot weenies. There are plenty of people out there with itchy
trigger fingers when it comes to GPL violations.

>3) For commercial users, it makes business sense to play by the rules,
>whatever those may be.  However, the rules are open to wide
>interpretation, and except for the very most grave and obvious breaches
>(e.g.  The Big Corporation installs Microsoft Office on all its
>computers worldwide without paying for it), it is basically infeasible
>for software publishers to enforce the terms of their licenses.  So what
>I have seen in Big Corporations I have worked for in the past is some
>sort of half-hearted attempt at license compliance, which really doesn't
>assure that each and every copy in use was paid for.

I've not found this to be true in the company work for, but it's my
first job since graduation, so I don't have a wide range of experience.
I'm vaguely aware that there's a software licencing protection
organisation which goes around poking into whether a company has
properly licenced software, which might explain it (I'm not sure how
they get the right to do this, since they're a private organisation and
copyright is a civil matter).

>From this perspective, in the present case of the CNRI license, one can
>see very little practical downside to marrying Python with GPL'ed code,
>if one has that desire.  Therefore, even though Richard Stallman may
>wake up in the middle of the night screaming over this, the rest of us
>should respond to the CNRI license's use of Virginia (and UCITA, by
>inference) in accordance with the following large, friendly letters:
>
>   DON'T PANIC

Judging by what people who know (Tim Peters, I think) have said here,
Stallman's problem isn't UCITA, it's just that his advice (from the
FSF's lawyers) is that any choice of law clause is an extra restriction
which is incompatible with the GPL. If that's right, someone who
distributes something which links Python to GPL'd software could be sued
by the owner of the GPL'd software (if the owner was feeling
particularly zealous, and rich).

I was responding more to the original poster's point, which was that you
don't really know what Virginia's legislature might decided to do at
some point in the future, by saying that they've already done something
quite bad, namely pass UCITA.

-- 
----- Paul Wright ------| Thin natural scientists who had spent months locked
-paul.wright at pobox.com--| away in their rooms growing white and fishlike,
http://pobox.com/~pw201 | emerged blinking into the light.
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