Hi, With regard to the disclaimer clauses regarding warranty and liability in many open source licenses I have the following question. Does a distributor of OSS need permission of the copyrightholders to provide warranty and to accept liability?
I heard that some distributors of open source software sometimes believe that they need permission of copyrightholders for this. It is not clear to me what the ratio behind this request for permission is, because if distributors provide warranties or liabilty -in my opinion- they are not overriding the terms of open source licenses. The provided warranty and accepted liabilty can be seen as additional services, that are laid down in a seperate agreement and only have legal force between the distributor and the enduser. The GPL for example seems to explicitly allow a distributor to provide warranty and to accept liability with regard to the distributed GPL-software (see articles 1, 2c, 11 and 12 of GPL). The BSD license does not allow it explicitly. However, because the disclaimer clause only mentions "COPYRIGHTHOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS", one can deduce that no permission is needed for a distributor to provide warranty and accepting liability. Is there any information available about this? And what is your opinion regarding the above? Cheers, Bart ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
