BSDL/GPL v3 compatibility
Mahesh T. Pai
paivakil at yahoo.co.in
Mon Sep 3 15:51:37 UTC 2007
Alexander Terekhov,
Do you really understand what you are replying to?
You are replying to:-
<begin quote>
</end quote>
No, *I* did not forget to put anything there; it is the person who
started this thread.
I shudder to think about you will [mis]represent what I said here on some other
thread to some other person?
Alexander Terekhov said on Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 04:31:42PM +0200,:
> On 8/25/07, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at linpro.no> wrote:
> > "Chris Travers" <chris.travers at gmail.com> writes:
> > > Hi all;
> >
> > That's a real stumper. I'll have to think about it and get back to
> > you.
>
> http://opensourcelaw.biz/publications/papers/BScott_BSD_The_Dark_Horse_of_Open_Source_070112lowres.pdf
>
> "What is the legal effect of being required to retain "this list of
> conditions". Are they just there for show? Do they have some other
> effect? In determining this, a court will look to the objective
> meaning of the clause and, potentially, the objective intention of the
> original licensor. In this case, the actual subjective intention of
> the party granting the license (and what they thought the words meant)
> is irrelevant.8 What the court is looking to determine is what the
> reasonable person (ie an idealized and dispassionate citizen who is
> called on to assess the scope of the license) would make of the
> words.9
>
> Consider first the warranty disclaimer. If there is a requirement to
> "retain" a copy of the warranty disclaimer in a redistribution, is a
> court likely to say the warranty disclaimer is intended to be
> effective or not? For example, could the disclaimer be retained but
> framed by a redistributor in such a way that the disclaimer had no
> legal force?10 It is likely that the reasonable person would read the
> license and think that the licensor intended that the warranty
> disclaimer was to be retained without qualification. A similar
> argument could be made about clause 5 (which prohibits endorsements).
>
> On this analysis, the warranty disclaimer travels with the
> distribution and the redistributor has no ability to qualify it. The
> question then becomes what about the other clauses? What about clause
> 2 which permits "redistribution and use" of the source form? If, in
> the case of the warranty disclaimer, the objective intention of the
> requirement to "retain" or "reproduce" the warranty disclaimer is that
> the warranty disclaimer cannot, by the manner of its retention, be
> limited in its application or scope. Why should the same reasoning not
> apply to the terms in the "list of conditions"? Moreover, if the
> disclaimer and endorsement prohibition are operative as conditions,
> what basis can there be for arguing that the other clauses are not?
>
> If the other license terms are operative, then the combined effect of
> clauses 2 and 3 is that redistribution of the source form must occur
> on the terms of the NBSDL.
>
> [...]
>
> REPRODUCTION IN SOURCE FORM WITH MODIFICATION..."
>
> regards,
> alexander.
--
Mahesh T. Pai <<>> http://paivakil.blogspot.com/
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