Legal soundness comes to open source distribution

David Johnson david at usermode.org
Sat Aug 3 01:59:47 UTC 2002


On Friday 02 August 2002 10:12 am, Mahesh T Pai wrote:
> In such case, the user would have acquired
> the media, (eg:- the CD coming with a magazine) and may or may not be
> aware of the contents. The contents of the same CD can often be
> distributed under different licenses.  Here, the issue of becoming aware
> of the license terms can arise when the user wants to install the
> software.  In such a situation, only "use wrap" will work.

The result of such licenses will be that distributors will refuse to include 
such software in their collections. One such presentation of license and 
demand for acceptance might be palatable, maybe even two. But when the 
installation of Linux or a BSD involves several, possibly dozens, of such 
demands, the user is going to very upset.

What if any of these packages became dependencies? Failure to agree to one of 
them could result in an unusable system!

-- 
David Johnson
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