Language question

[Abe Kornelis]

Marius,

thanks for your response.
See below for my comments.

> > Now, when ownership of rights is transferred, any associated
> > obligations should be transferred along with it. I have a feeling
> > that 'transferring ownership of obligations with respect to the
software'
> > is not the way to say that in english. Anybody happen to know
> > how to formulate such a requirement in english?
>
> The only problem I see is only of what you might call 'semantic
> collocation': "owning obligations" doesn't sound quite right:
--> Exactly.

> you "own"
> *rights*, but *obligations* are more "imposed" on you that "owned" by you,
no?
> There is a clash: "own" has a 'good' connotation, and "obligations" has
> a 'bad' one.
--> That's rather black-and-white. I usually accept obligations. E.g. I
accept
the obligation to work 5 days a week in exchange for an agreed payment.
Is it imposed on me? I chose myself, but the obligation is there anyway.
Nevertheless you are quite right in that the right to be paid pleases me
better
than the obligation to get up early in the morning ;-)

> Maybe a neat solution is just excising the problematic verb:
>   transferring obligations w.r.t. the software
--> That might be a neat solution. Except I do not yet see how to
formulate this in conjunction with transferral of ownership of rights.
'to transfer ownership of rights and of obligations incurred with respect
to the software' still sounds awkward to me.

> Now, there might be another problem, which is the application of copyright
> law. I'm not sure that under copyright law when you sell the copyright the
> prior obligations set out on an open source license stick i.e. the new
owner
> is automatically bound to them. But of course I may be completely off the
> point here. And of course IANAL, TINLA (I am not a lawer, this is not
legal
> advice).
--> I know, I know. You do raise a point. Complicating the matter is, that
copyright laws may differ from country to country. Nevertheless, I think it
is good to state the intention in the license. If it does not hold under
certain
jurisdictions, alas. The least I can do is to throw a serious effort at it.

Kind regards, Abe.






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