RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments

[SamBC]

Why not specify in the license what 'reasonable' means. I would simply state
(as I have seen)

"You will not be required at any point to justify a charge as reasonable to
anyone except the party(ies) whom you are charging"


SamBC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Weigel [mailto:mcweigel+ at cs.cmu.edu]
> Sent: 23 July 2000 20:15
> To: David Johnson
> Cc: Matthew C. Weigel; license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: RMS on Plan 9 license, with my comments
>
>
> [sorry I'm using a different account, it's a little more convenient]
>
> On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, David Johnson wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, Matthew C. Weigel wrote:
> >
> > The clause in question does not state that Lucent gets to decide what
> > is "reasonable". For all intents and purposes, if a buyer and a sell
> > agree on a price, it is reasonable. As such, it is a meaningless
> > adjective.
>
> Is it meaningless?  Or is that simply your analysis?  Myself, I hesitate
> to label portions of licenses as 'meaningless' without legal counsel.
>
> You are trying to treat the license as a cut and dried technical
> statement, and it's not; its application includes jurisdiction,
> precedence, judge, and jury.  Any one of those can make a decision about
> what 'reasonable' means.
>
> If 'reasonable' were struck out, at least there wouldn't be an explicit
> encouragement to interpret what sort of fees are legally acceptable.
>
> > On the other hand, to be nit-picky about it, the GPL only allows you to
> > charge for transferring a copy, or for supplying a warranty. I can't
> > sell the copy itself, nor can I charge for the media.
>
> Which is good.  The transfer is what people are actually interested in,
> anyways.  Keep in mind, these licenses don't apply to the original author,
> so the license helps licensees (users and developers).
>
>
>