BOINC: lib/cal.h license issue agree with the DFSG?

[Francesco Poli]

On Sat, 2 Jan 2010 12:45:19 -0800 Sean Kellogg wrote:

> On Saturday 02 January 2010 10:15:19 am Francesco Poli wrote:
> > On Fri, 1 Jan 2010 15:13:58 -0800 Sean Kellogg wrote:
[...]
> > Neutrality?  We are not on Wikipedia, here!
> > I clearly stated that I was going to express my own personal opinion...
> 
> Which is exactly why d-l still has a bad reputation in Debian...

As I already said in the past, I am not the FTP-masters' spokesperson:
if you want to know *their* opinion, you should ask it to *them*.

On debian-legal you can get opinions from people who care about
DFSG-freeness issues and spend time in reviewing licenses and such, for
the benefit of the Debian Project.

BTW, being attacked for spending one's own time in analyzing licenses
to contribute to the Debian Project is getting more and more
frustrating... 

[...]
> > > The GPL takes away all sorts of rights... this can't possible be what
> > > DFSG #1 is intended on prohibiting.
> > 
> > Which rights (that I would have in the absence of any license) does the
> > GPL take away?
> 
> GPLv3 sections 15 and 16. The presence of such waivers are often seen
> by courts as a form of consideration, which implies it is either a fee
> or a forbearance. Since it's not a fee in this case, it must be a
> forbearance, which is the taking away of a right. It's the common
> position among law professors where I attended that the GPL is a
> contract, as opposed to a straight up license, because of these very
> clauses.

I think that depicting this as taking away "all sorts of rights" is a
bit exaggerated.
Disclaimers of warranty and limitations of liability are commonly found
in Free Software licenses: it's technically true that they can be seen
as rights taken away (and thus some sort of exception to my DFSG#1
interpretation), but I don't see them as comparable to the clause we
were talking about, where *any* suit against the copyright holder is
forbidden.

[...]
> > Steve Langasek has already explained that such a clause is equally
> > non-free.
> 
> While looking up the specific clauses for disclaimer and liability,
> I noticed section 12 of GPLv3.
[...]

Again, Steve Langasek has already replied.

[...]
> > Since "this license [...] supersedes all proposals and prior
> > discussions and writings [...]", it seems that I cannot consider any
> > other *prior* grant of permission as valid.
> > 
> > Maybe *later* grants of permission can be valid and I should have been
> > less fast in generalizing my sentence to *any* other grant...
> 
> Ah, perhaps I mistakenly read your comment to suggest there was /no/
> grant of permission, as in this clause negated the grant at the top.
> But, yes, this is a very common contractual construction [...]
> 
> I guess my question is, do you feel it in someway presents a DFSG problem?

It would not be a DFSG-freeness issue, if the rest of the license were
OK.  But the rest of the license is not enough to meet the DFSG, so I
was hoping I was not reading the whole story...
Instead, it seems I was reading the entire grant of permission.

[...]
> > I think it is superfluous, since no part of the license seems to do
> > things like transfers of copyright ownerships or such.
> > Hence, it looks like a clause that makes it very clear what is already
> > rather clear: in this sense, I think it is superfluous.
> 
> Then perhaps you did not go to law school,

Definitely not.  I am a mechanical engineer...

> where they drill into your head that words are cheep, but litigation is
> expensive. Always better to err on the side over verbosity if there is
> ever a doubt...

OK, so you agree that this clause was added just to make it sure that
the concept is crystal clear, but that the concept is already
implicitly present in the rest of the license...

This is basically what I meant by "superfluous".


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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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