[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.2.0 released

Richard Fontana fontana at sharpeleven.org
Sun Feb 24 01:41:02 UTC 2013


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 04:40:03PM -0500, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> Warranty and Limitation of Liability: You've tried to carry these down to
> distributors, but what if the distributors don't want the advantage of the
> clauses? What if, as my business model, for a fee I am offering a warranty and
> a higher limitation of liability that you have offered?  Maybe add a "unless
> waived" provision?

The GPL (v2 and v3, at least) has language to that effect, both in the
disclaimers themselves and in the basic distribution provision. I took
the latter language out early on as -- I thought -- stating the
obvious. I'd kind of ignored the fact that the disclaimers say "EXCEPT
WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING" because I mostly scrapped the GPL
versions in favor of models from other licenses. 

The reason I carried them down to distributors is the assumption that
in the usual case the mere redistributor should benefit from them (or
shouldn't be expected to make the effort of applying its own
disclaimers, though that's likely to happen for commercial
redistributors anyway). Do you believe the license prevents a
downstream licensee (mere redistributor or otherwise) from departing
from the effect of the clauses in a way that would be to the detriment
of such downstream licensee?

I assumed it was obvious that you can offer a warranty in the same way
that it's obvious (or so I believe) you can offer support or other
forms of service.

- RF






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