[copyleft-next] copyleft-next 0.2.0 released

Pamela Chestek pchestek at gmail.com
Sun Feb 24 02:35:28 UTC 2013


On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org>wrote:

> 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.
>
> Hmmm, I suppose not.  It would require some sophistication on the part of
the entity offering the warranty, though, to expressly state that it was
intentionally abrogating the license in this way -- and I doubt that an
unsophisticated entity would be offering this service, so no harm.  But
assuming it was an unsophisticated entity who offered the warranty, if the
license isn't specifically referenced you may end up with dueling
agreements and therefore interpretation problems.

But I think what's more problematic is whether the attempt to offer the
warranty would be considered imposing an additional restriction--I hope
not, but nevertheless you are introducing a situation where you are forcing
people to say "this part of the copyleft-next license doesn't apply here."
I think it's probably better as a policy matter to avoid those situations,
particularly where it's easy enough to just say "except where otherwise
stated in writing."

Pam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/attachments/20130223/682aae81/attachment.html>


More information about the copyleft-next mailing list