EU situation should be looked at by everyone [LWN.net]

EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 13, 2023 21:00 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: EU situation should be looked at by everyone by farnz
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Debian offers you a copyright licence, and you agree to be bound by its terms.

No. All Open Source licenses (or licenses which comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines) are distributor licenses, not user licenses! The licenses grant Debian the right to give you the programs, but you are under no obligation to accept or comply with those licenses!

Of course, without the permission granted by those licenses, you cannot make copies for others (or in the case of the AGPL, run the code on a public-facing server), but unless you want to make copies for others, that's a non-issue, and you can ignore the licenses rather than accept them. The GPL even explicitly states that you need not accept it and can instead choose to be bound by normal copyright law--which means no making copies.

And if you do choose to accept the license terms and distribute the code, that's between you and the copyright holders! Aside from code Debian actually wrote (apt, dpkg, etc.), Debian didn't offer you any licenses! They merely passed along the license offers. There is no agreement between you and Debian regarding the kernel or the shell or python or X or anything. Debian merely exercised their rights under the license to give you a copy; their involvement basically ended when the download finished!

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EU situation should be looked at by everyone

Posted Dec 13, 2023 21:24 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

But Debian aren't just offering me the software; they're also offering me their arrangement of that software into a compilation, which itself has a form of copyright applying to it. The licence I accept from Debian may well be implied, rather than explicit, but I need some form of permission to allow me to copy that arrangement.

In EU law, there's certain licences that are granted automatically as a matter of law, but they're still enough to function in terms of the offer, consideration, acceptance set required to form a contract - Debian, in this case, is offering me a licence (which it presumably has permission to do) that permits me to download the installer image.