Let me resolve that doubt. I've seen that very argument made, in person, by an attorney.
Regards, Branden -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric S. Raymond Sent: Monday, November 23, 2015 1:29 PM To: Wheeler, David A <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]; J Lovejoy <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Prototype spdxify codewalker Wheeler, David A <[email protected]>: > ESR: > > I will now express an opinion: It is *highly unlikely* that a court will > > ever find any change of open-source license actionable, with one possible > > exception: changes between reciprocal (GPL-style) and non-reciprocal > > licenses. But from a court's point of view the difference between (say) > > BSD and Apache would be very much de minimis non curat lex. > > I'll disagree with you on that *specific* point, even though I'm not a lawyer > either. Many organizations specifically choose the Apache-2.0 license > because they want the patent statements that are notably *not* in > BSD-3-Clause and BSD-2-Clause. Given the potential costs of patent > litigation (which sometimes look more like extortion), and their belief that > these Apache-2.0 clauses will help address those costs, I think they could > make a great argument that this is *not* a de minimis difference. In short: > I would not just s/Apache-2.0/BSD-2-Clause/ on software I didn't have all the > rights to :-). OK, there is a possible equity argument there. A thin and doubtful one, but you have a point. > However, I think there's value in trying to faithfully capture > whatever legal text originally came from the originator. And the design of SPDX is intended to incorporate that text by reference. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
