Re: FLA

On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 03:25:42PM +0100, Harri Porten wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 02:31:15PM +0100, Harri Porten wrote:

> > I would note that the main point of licenses is not opinions.
> > They try to legally enforce the decision of the rights holder.
> > In this case to release work as Free Software.
> 
> Note that we use different licences in KDE and there are even more
> opinions on how to interpret them.

There are good reason to choose different Free Software licenses,
but what each of them means should be fairly clear.

> > The license has to be effective on a pratical legal basis
> > and opinions only have a very limited legal influence.
> 
> In court, yes. But with e.g the GPL never been legally challenged (to my
> knowledge) I have the attribute everything that has happened under its
> influence to be based solely on opinions and interpretations conveyed and
> discussed by authors, users and bystanders (slashdot readers). My very
> personal theory :)

The GPL was legally challenged and won the best end of legal battles possible:
The lawyers from the offenders looked at it and told their clients:
Chances of winning in court are minimal, we need to comply.
Nextstep and Objective-C in gcc is such a case.

> > The idea of the FLA is that the fiduciary (e.g. the FSFE or the KDE e.V.)
> > acts on behalf of the people. The FLA makes sure that this (e.g.
> > fully release as Free Software) is done or the rights will fall back.
> 
> Sure. We intend to do the same with the trademark assignment. It's a safe
> model. But as stated previously KDE needs some more organizational work to
> have a functional and accepted fiduciary. And I don't mean to say that the
> lack thereof is a killer argument in the copyright discussion brought up
> by Mark.
> 
> > The ability to fix legal bugs is in the interest of Free Software authors.
> 
> Again depends on the interpretation of what a "bug" is.

I agree with your last two points.
Still it is an advantage if a non-profit organisation and its lawyers try
to get good legal interpretations compare to reach author for themselfs.

	Bernhard

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