F/OSS is rife with legal ambiguities and risk. F/OSS is subject to an anomalous, complex, and decentralized licensing scheme that has evolved entirely apart from conventional, commercial licensing models.
Full story »F/OSS is rife with legal ambiguities and risk. F/OSS is subject to an anomalous, complex, and decentralized licensing scheme that has evolved entirely apart from conventional, commercial licensing models.
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akf
15 years 28 weeks 5 days 7 hours ago
FUD
This is FUD!
Jacobsen v. Katzer was about the Artistic License, not about Free Software licenses in general. The FSF warned of this license long before that case.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ArtisticLicense
Of course it is a win for Free Software, if even the weakest license is enforcable. But if it were not, it would not mean, that other licenses are also not enforcable.
mjd
15 years 28 weeks 4 days 19 hours ago
How do "experts" like this sleep at night?
"Proving damages is difficult when the breached contract involves software that is given away for free."
Does that mean I can do what I like with Internet Explorer, Acrobat Reader, Flash, etc.?
"Without copyright infringement claims, enforcing F/OSS licenses would be extremely difficult."
If you break the conditions of the license, vanilla copyright applies, and you're a copyright infringer. Same as with any proprietary software license. Should we also be saying that proprietary licenses are "rife with legal ambiguities and risk"?
"... the enforceability of F/OSS contracts has still not been definitively decided."
http://gpl-violations.org/news/20060922-dlink-judgement_frankfurt.html
If you're arguing from the point of view of "conventional, commercial [...] models", it appears you can be as ignorant (or mendacious) as you like, and still be considered an authority.