Hi Larry,
On 27/11/12 04:57, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
Consider the hapless corporate attorney who is forced to review hundreds of
proprietary software licenses when authorizing the distribution or
sale/purchase of his company's software products. Each of those proprietary
licenses may contain restrictions on transfer; unique indemnity and warranty
provisions; attribution requirements or prohibitions; etc.
My sympathy for such hapless individuals is real, albeit tempered by the
fact that as a reward for taking on such onerous work they probably earn
at least triple what I do ;-P
But once you've done your variant-gathering, will you recommend that
everyone else do the same for their own open source software as Mozilla will
do for Firefox OS? That's a lot of work to recommend for others to do.
Fortunately, I have a script which can analyse a source tree and produce
the necessary output for inclusion with software.
That
would seem to be a waste of time considering the infinitesimally tiny risk
that one of those "variant" licensors would sue you for breach for taking
the easy way out -- such as:
"This software includes contributions under one or more variants of the
official BSD and MIT license versions published at
www.opensource.org.
Mozilla has chosen not to publish those individual variant licenses
along
with this distribution, although we are disclosing its source code as
those licenses require."
That's an interesting recommendation, although one that (as far as I
know) has never been taken up by any distributor of aggregated software.
I am certainly not competent to judge whether, for example, the addition
of an extra word to the disclaimer has legal effect or not, and if by
instead referencing a license with slightly different wording we might
upset someone who included that word for a reason.
Also, these licenses don't require disclosure of source code.
software. Those licensors can't sue you anyway unless they register their
copyrights, which is unlikely to have happened for such works. Damages in
such a lawsuit would be minimal at worst. For a company that can afford to
swat away any such nuisance lawsuits, taking this easy way out may be worth
the risk, unless your lawyer tells you that no risk is ever worth taking.
"Mozilla ignores clear provisions of open source licenses; says 'well,
we probably won't get sued, so who cares?'". A great headline for Slashdot.
Gerv
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