On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 01:38:26PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote: > I saw a short note by Andrew Suffield regarding Choice of Venue in Free > Software licenses, which was pointed to by the Debian weekly news. > > Choice of venue can be a useful clause for the purpose of protecting > Free Software authors from frivolous lawsuits /against them /in venues > where it is difficult or impossible to defend themselves, but where they > could still be damaged. In general such damage would be due to > reciprocal treaties or the fact that they might someday wish to visit a > nation where a judgement exists against them. > > Note that a disclaimer of warranties is not by itself sufficient to > protect the author. No one license term is. A court may decide not to > honor a disclaimer of warranty, while still honoring choice of venue and > sending the case elsewhere. > > It was not my intent in designing the DFSG to rule out choice-of-venue. > I do not recall anyone else connected with the DFSG making comments > against it during the discussion leading up to acceptance of the DFSG. > > The closest DFSG term to this issue is the one about discrimination > against persons or groups. A choice of venue of the actual jurusdiction > in which the copyright holder is resident would not in my opinion be > discriminatory. A choice designed to increase difficulty might be. > > I don't see that the DFSG language as it currently exists reads against > all choice-of-venue clauses. Nor do I see that additional language to > add that feature to the DFSG is necessary.
Thanks Bruce. Altough upstream already agreed to waive this clause, i believe much as you do above, and that debian-legal has been slanted much in defending the rights of the user of free software, at the detriment of the upstream author. Friendly, Sven Luther