Necessary to limit liability

Necessary to limit liability

Posted Jun 16, 2003 18:02 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Opinion on Brazil making Open Source mandatory in government

I subscribe to the pragmatic "use the best tool for the job, regardless of license" view. On the other hand, the best tool for the job depends not only on the technical merit of the software but the license; a tool which is illegal or impossible to use for the job is never best. If you cannot get a license which permits you to use the software in the way you require, it should be excluded even if it is technically better for your purpose. Furthermore, it may be important to choose software which you can prove that you are using legally (rather than simply such that it would be impractical to prove that you are using illegally).

So it seems plausible and likely that Brazil's use of software depends on some uses which are possible but illegal with non-Free software. License management for a country's worth of low-paid government workers is basically impossible. Unless a vendor is willing to license the software such that Brazil is not required to prevent government workers from copying it, Brazil cannot be sure they are safe from prosecution. How exactly would you prove that software installed on more machines than any individual will ever see in person is properly licensed without necessarily trustworthy people? By making sure that the installed software is licensed for use by anyone anywhere, without any usage restrictions.

Demonstrating a GPL violation requires an end user (who got a program without the source and license) in addition to the copyright holder, and a GPL violation is generally easy, safe, and cheap to fix (unless you've built modifiy binaries and lost the changes without giving the source to anyone, I guess). This makes it much safer from a user licensing perspective than anything proprietary.

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