Michael Lake wrote:
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.
Actually, this is more complicated than it looks. The TPA applies to
contracts, not gifts. So when you or I contribute to a GPL or BSD
project with it's warranty clauses then we are covered -- the TPA
can't strike down those clauses since we aren't receiving any
consideration, so there's no contract. There's only the license
and if people don't like the terms then they can't distribute the
program.
Non-Debian distribution have a problem -- they are getting
consideration. But they can afford lawyering.
NICTA's problem is simple -- they want to sell software under a
BSD-like license. This is a good thing: they get revenue but
the code doesn't get locked away. Personally, I'd address that
by making the sale price $1 more than contracts covered by the
warranty clauses of the TPA.
The other TPA issue to be careful with is avoiding third line
forcing when offering support contracts for the code. And
NICTA's strategy seems to me to run that risk.
Prof Brian Fitzgerald went through the TPA issue at length at
linux.conf.au 2004, there's a summary in his paper here
<http://www.law.qut.edu.au/files/Free_Software_and_Government.pdf>
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
What, your editor can't do a global search and replace?
My object to the license is more fundamental. It should be a copyleft
license so I get the most value for my taxation investment.
Cheers,
Glen
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