Re: [Fsfe-uk] GPL licence untested, authors could lose their rights in UK

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 09:04 +0100, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> WE know that the GPL means license rather than sale, but do the
> customers infer such after reading the license? I think "not sold" is
> a very important part of the statement, one that needs clearly making.

Hmm, I don't know. There is an argument about customer's expectations,
but I think it would be a hard argument to make: virtually everything
digital (and things which aren't) are licensed, not sold. Software is
virtually never sold, ditto music CDs and DVDs, etc.

Saying "this software is not being sold" might make it clearer to
someone reading the license, but I think the onus really ought to be on
the people trading the software commercially to figure that out.

> Should we limit the license such that if law implies certain extended
> terms the license is rather revoked than extended?

I don't think that would be a great idea. The current wording - that as
much warranty as possible is disclaimed - means that your liability as a
distributor is minimised as much as possible while leaving the software
distributable. If we enumerate liabilities precisely, and then revoke
the licence if extra liabilities are implied, I would imagine that free
software would become undistributable in most of the world.

> Another way to manage this is to require that the customer make some
> slight "modifications" in order to run the software, and thus having
> changed its nature the licensor can then be held less responsible for
> it.
> 
> i.e. ship software that won't quite run.

That would definitely something you can't commercially get away with in
the UK; as it would ship, the software would not be fit for purpose.

I don't really see how making modifications would change the liability
system anyway: I think any Judge would just see that as an attempt to
get around statutory liabilities, which is just like trying to dodge
tax. It's not ethical and we shouldn't attempt to do it.

Cheers,

Alex.