* Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Calling an open source license a gift is nice semantics, but I am unsure > what else that description gets us... > > Try asking yourself what is the remedy for breach/violation of an open > source license that the copyright holder/licensor can pursue? In answering > the question, it is not enough to say that no one will violate the license; > I am asking a "what if" question (and, truth be told, open source licenses > occasionally are violated).
I think the problem a lot of us have with clickwrap licenses and the like is that we aren't lawyers and we can't necessarily understand all the details of the licenses. I for one can't be sure I'd know how to word the click wrapping and/or how to present it; it brings lots of issues with it - what happens about applications in multiple languages? What happens with packages that are automatically installed as part of another unrelated package? What about ones which get installed as part of an automatic upgrade? These things get complex. Also from the users perspective; a large company might ban an employee from accepting a license without the company lawyer seeing it - we don't want to restrict peoples use of open source software like that. Also from a personal perspective I could potentially be faced with the problem of spending an hour reading over a license; and I'm not a lawyer so I might not see all the implications! Perhaps one of the answers to your question is that since the suggestion is that no restrictions on the >use< of the software is allowable then there is no way that a user would be able to break the license and therefore no need to worry about remedy. The only possible way that such a license could be broken is in the creation of a derivative work or by copying it. Now while it is potentially possible to present a license at startup of an application (and thus on first use) it is not possible to present a license to someone before they copy or modify a work. For example they can copy a CD with my code on without my code ever being run; indeed they can modify it without it ever being run in its original form. Dave ---------------- Have a happy GNU millennium! ---------------------- / Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy \ \ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM, SPARC and HP-PA | In Hex / \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
