On 29-Jun-08, at 7:44 AM, Raj Mathur wrote: >> and when you finally find a buyer for that bridge across the Yamuna >> don't forget to add octroi and VAT > > If you don't believe me, I'd suggest you get some competent lawyer to > read the various licences at opensource.org and explain to you how > none > of them prevents you from selling the software.
if you are talking law, you would know that interpretation of statutes (and licenses, contracts etc) does not depend on the mere letter of the law. So by just examining the licenses, no lawyer, competent or not can give an opinion on this. there are two types of competent lawyers: 1. Those who look at the laws and court rulings and tell you what can be done within the confines of these laws 2. Those who look beyond what is written and work to create/develop the law on the relevant subject ultimately law is made by the supreme court. There is no such thing as 'settled law', laws are always subject to change - just needs a larger bench of the supreme court to do so. And when the court looks at any law, they look at the written law as well as such things as natural justice, equity, interests of the state, interests of the public in general and then they pronounce on the law. In the case of software in general and FOSS in particular, there is a school of thought that software is knowledge which belongs to mankind and can neither be bought nor sold. I happen to subscribe to that school of thought. And I know competent lawyers who also belong to that school of thought, who are working to get rulings from courts in these areas. So the question is: which type of competent lawyer should I approach? Further, there are two more problems here: 1. No two lawyers agree on anything. So how many opinions do I get? 2. A legal opinion is only worth anything if a fee is paid and the opinion is given on the firm letterhead and signed on every page. For an opinion on a matter so fraught with controversy and with huge financial implications, the fee would run to several lakhs - I cannot afford that. Anyway, the practical problem before us is that purveyors of FOSS have to charge service tax as they have been advised that FOSS software is not a commodity that can be bought or sold. Proprietary software vendors get away with VAT - as the rate of ST is 12% and VAT much lower, this puts FOSS vendors at a disadvantage. If we can get a strong enough legal opinion on this subject, then we too could charge VAT and become more competitive. Maybe we could get an opinion from Eben Moglen (only lawyer that I know of who is competent in this field). > > Some licences like the GPL force you to provide source code for a > nominal fee along with binaries at the user's request; I thought all OSI licenses force you to do this > however, that > nominal fee applies to the source code, not to the binaries -- > there is > no limit on how much you can charge for the binaries. > > In short, not being able to sell FOSS is a limitation of the market > (no > one wants to buy it), rather than some intrinsic limitation in FOSS > itself. I would tend to the opinion that sale of any software, let alone FOSS is illegal, immoral and an act of cheating - the only point is, that the courts have to recognise this. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves Associate, NRC-FOSS [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://nrcfosshelpline.in/code/ _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
