On 1/25/06, Francesco Poli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Any dispute arising out of or > > related to this Agreement shall be brought in the courts of Santa > > Clara County, California, USA. > > This is a choice of venue and is considered non-free by many > debian-legal contributors (including me...).
And some of us think it's reasonable. If Adobe is going to take legal action against someone else, they'll have to deal with the jurisdiction(s) where this someone else has a presence. There's some benefit to Adobe if that jurisdiction is willing to turn control of the case to the california courts, but that doesn't seem to have any direct relevance on software freedom. It's not like there are all that many things for Adobe to be taking action against someone else on here. The big deal here is that if someone sues Adobe, Adobe doesn't have to incur huge legal fees defending themselves. Since it's free software, why would they want to? Choice of venue, to me, means "we're giving this away, and we don't want to have to pay big legal fees because of that." No one has ever demonstrated any mechanism where choice of venue could prevent porting, security patches, enhancements or other such things. At least, not that I'm aware of. -- Raul