Jules Bean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Now, you don't know the answer here, and neither do I. You don't think > licenses are enforceable on minors. I find that hard to believe. I > suggest we wait until someone else comes along who can clear this up.
IANAL, so this possibly doesn't qualify as "cleaning up", but I'd like to thow in my two coins anyway: No, a minor cannot accept liabilities, so he cannot accept a contract that places greater demands on him than if the contract had not existed. However, this is not the case for free licenses like the GPL: by accepting the GPL what you have to accept is not liabilities you didn't have before - you only have to recognize that the rights given to you by the GPL have certain bounds. (And you have to accept not to sue the author over any losses connected to your use of the program, but I don't think you could do that WITHOUT the GPL either, because then you wouldn't have any right to get harmed by the program in the first place.) One should not use analogies, but nevertheless: consider I paved a path across my front yard and put up a sign saying "anyone, feel free to use this path if you don't step on the lawn". The same logic as in the license case would lead to the conclusion that minors can't legally use my path because they can't accept the responsibility of not stepping on the lawn. However, this is bogus, because if the minor stepped on my lawn even without legally accepting my sign, he would still be trespassing. -- Henning Makholm
