OSS-lics vs. liability and warranty

[Mitchell Baker]

The Mozilla Public License explicitly allows a distributor to do this.

Mitchell

bird birdie wrote:

>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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>
>  
>

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