SCO's new offensive [LWN.net]

SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 22, 2003 22:30 UTC (Tue) by lolando (subscriber, #7139)
In reply to: SCO's new offensive by piman
Parent article: SCO's new offensive

> The GPL does not pose any complex legal issues;

Unfortunately, it does, in probably most of the world. It's written in English, for a start, which makes it hard to be valid at least here in France. It also strongly depends on the USAn copyright system (which seems to be rather widespread so this point may not be very important). It may also go against seemingly unrelated laws, like concurrency and customer protection laws: it's not straightforward that offering no guarantee of any kind is legal here.

I'm taking the example of France because I'm French, but I assume some of these points are valid in other continental Europe countries, and probably others too.

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SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 23, 2003 3:29 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

"It may also go against seemingly unrelated laws, like concurrency and customer protection laws: it's not straightforward that offering no guarantee of any kind is legal here."

If this is not legal, then Microsoft, Sun, SCO, IBM, HP, and pretty much every other proprietary software company is in big trouble. Every proprietary EULA that I've read includes a disclaimer of warranty; the GPL is hardly alone in this regard. It's such common practice, both for free and non-free software, that any objections along these lines would be laughable; no court could rule against the GPL because of the lack of guarantee without also ruling against the entire software industry. Of course, everything SCO has been doing is laughable, but this would be even more so than usual.

SCO's new offensive

Posted Jul 24, 2003 11:02 UTC (Thu) by one2team (guest, #7316) [Link]

Most shrink-wrapped licenses are almost certainly abusive and at least partly illegal/void in most of the world. They rely on the fact

- almost no one reads the fine print
- most of the people who read it know it's junk and do not bother invalidating them in court
- it's easier to intimidate people with stuff they do not understand
- parts of them may have been upholded at some time in a *US* court

Why do you think so many of them state "parts of this document may not be legal your country" ?

(as to why companies bother with them - do *YOU* think a company lawyer will tell his clueless boss he's paid to write junk ?)