[License-review] The Vaccine License

[Bruce Perens]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 8:35 PM Grahame Grieve <
grahame at healthintersections.com.au> wrote:
> I was bothered by the lack of ethics implied in the outcome.

There is only the fact that *you *are not able to impose *your idea of
ethics* upon others. In general, good societies *do not give that power to
individuals. *Instead, they express it *collectively, *as when a court
reaches a verdict and the associated government enforces it.

So, you can see why I place my emphasis on law, rather than license terms.

> It seems to me that even if the condition is unenforceable, that doesn't
mean it has zero value as a statement.

Statements are fine, but belong in other places than a license. The purpose
of a license is to be parsed by a judge, in a court. Consider it a sort of
legal program. Adding things that to your text that will require lots of
expensive legal argument to execute, or that do not work as expected by the
legally-naive programmer, is a disservice to the Open Source developer.

I speak from knowledge. I ran up over half a Million in legal bills
defending myself in a relatively simple case. I don't want to cause this
for other people!

Would they? Some one gives something of value away, on the condition it not
> be used in a particular way? Is there precedent on this?
>

Yes. It's called "copyright misuse", and the lawyers here can expound on
that topic better than I.

    Thanks

    Bruce
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20191030/734b444f/attachment.html>