> Is there a reference of some sort for this? It's the case at http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/courtweb/pdf/D02NYSC/01-07482.PDF . IMO it's not all that germane to warranty disclaimer, and I'm not buying the chain of extrapolation that leads from this case to the conclusion that click-wrap might be necessary.
> It's about the only solid reason I see to need to go beyond copyright law. It's not about copyright law at all. The warranty obligation does not follow the copyright. It's about: 1. Is a simple warranty disclaimer that does not require agreement adequate? 2. How do you need to present the warranty disclaimer? 3. Do you really need a contract that other parties actually agree to in some way, for example by clicking "yes"? It's reasonably clear that you need one if you want someone else to indemnify you. It's not nearly so clear that you need one if you simply want to disclaim warranties. > Agreed. That's why I think we need to amend the OSD so that it > clearly states that a license must not restrict use, > modification, or redistribution of the software. I agree that there should be no restrictions on use, modification, or distribution _other_than_those_ necessary to implement the goals of Open Source, such as disclaiming the warranty, preserving the copyright statement, mandating source distribution when the licensor chooses that option, and mandating transmission of the license to all parties. A simple "no restrictions" equates to public domain. Larry Rosen: > I am baffled by everyone's confusion and philosophical rantings. That's distressing. This is your own community, or should be, since you claim to represent them. If they are confused, shouldn't you blame your presentation of the issue? If they are philosophical, and you didn't expect that, could it be that you've lost touch with them? So far, I see some significantly better alternatives than click-through. The very first should be a set of guidelines for distributions and other environments where free software is installed that would cause them to inform the user that: 1) There are licenses. 2) They disclaim warranties. 3) This is how you view the licenses. 4) This is how you look at the source code to perform your own due diligence. In the case of a distribution, most of them already do this at distribution install time. Debian does display a click-through warranty disclaimer when you install it. It also has a login message disclaiming warranties, but only on the text login. Obviously, this needs to be beefed up. In the case of package installers on something other than a Linux distribution, where we have less control of the enivronment, perhaps click-through is appropriate, but I still would oppose allowing it to be a license requirement. A license that requires it is going to cause us no end of trouble with the environments where we can deal with the problem more easily. Thanks Bruce -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3