On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 05:48:52PM +1000, Michael Lake wrote: > Ricky wrote: > >what do you think of an "Australian version" of the open source licence ? > >Note that this isn't GPL > > > >http://nicta.com.au/director/commercialisation/open_source_licence.cfm > > > >good ? bad ? sensible ? necessary ? > > Not good. I do understand that something that comes with no warrrant, not > even an implied one might be against some juristrictions laws but to have > acountry specific licence I think is a bad move.
A country-specific licence isn't the best, but I'll give them points for trying -- it's a lot better than the last draft they put around. Specifically, they've allowed a fall-back to the stock UoI/NCSA licence if the copyright holder isn't in Australia, and they've qualified the warranty bit down the bottom to limit it to only situations where there's legislation which says you can't disclaim all warranties. This might seem trivial, but the last version of this licence that went around didn't have that last bit, so as an OSS hacker releasing under this licence, you were effectively agreeing to rewrite the software if someone who downloaded it didn't like it. At least this time you have to be engaging in trade before the Trade Practices Act kicks in and requires you to not disclaim all warranties. > Specifically against this licence you have to enter things like <Name of > Institution>, <Insert applicable jurisdiction, eg: New South Wales, > Australia> etc throughout the document. It's not like the GPL which you > just insert in there. This has to be "hand crafted" for each institution - > dumb. The <Insert Jurisdiction> bit is kinda necessary in any choice-of-law clause -- you can't practically make that a runtime variable (as it were). It wouldn't make much sense to have a country-specific licence without a choice-of-law clause, though. The <Name of $foo> bits could be abstracted out to things like "Copyright Holder", but that probably requires a fair chunk of legalese in the licence to define all the terms used. What I'd really like to see is licences which try really hard to ignore the vagaries of particular jurisdictions' laws and just get down to the specifics of what you're really after in a licence -- the "four freedoms" would be a great licence, if it weren't for lawyers who spend all their time looking for loopholes to sneak through. If only everyone played fair, by the spirit of the rules rather than the exact letter, the world would be such a happy place... (cue Lionel Hutz' vision about a world without lawyers). - Matt -- "All I care about [a linux distro] is it detect my hardware (non-Debian strengths), and teach me to fish instead of just giving me a smelly old fish (most people 'xcept Debian), and I guess don't just give me a fish biology textbook (gentoo)." -- Tom (in d-devel) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
