OSS-lics vs. liability and warranty

[bird birdie]

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

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