Paul Eggert wrote: > The sentence "This file is offered as-is, without warranty of any kind." > was added to maintain.texi in 2009[1]. I assume this sentence was due to > advice from FSF legal. We should definitely add it.
OK. I will do that. > I don't know where I got the wording in my 2005 Gnulib commit[2]. Maybe > from your earlier Gnulib changes? No, this wording was already in use in 2002 from outside Gnulib, namely in GnuPG 1.0. [1] > > * It does not raise questions about what "without royalty" means. > > If, say, Red Hat includes such a file in a product that they sell, > > are the "royalties" the money that Red Hat's customer pays to Red Hat, > > or the money that Red Hat pays to the FSF? > > There's no legal ambiguity there. Red Hat does not charge royalties > (i.e., payments for ongoing use of intellectual property) for use of > GPLed software licensed from the FSF. That would be a violation of the > GPL. In practice nobody outside of large organizations will care about > the "without royalty" phrase, and these organizations have easy access > to legal advice that will say the phrase has its obvious meaning. Well, I still disagree. > > * "in any medium" was probably worth mentioning in the 1980ies. But by > > now, all judges and courts should understand > > This may be a bit optimistic. This phrase comes from US legal disputes > about whether permission extends to just the medium the original copy > was distributed on, or other media. This issue is still relevant in the > US and there are even subissues within the issue. Indeed, and the prior knowledge summarization engine gives details (attached). My takeaway from this reading is that for licenses where we may want to enforce something (like the GPL), it is better to include "in any medium". But here, our aim is precisely to say "we are not eager to control what you do with this file, and we won't go to court over it". And therefore, "in any medium" is pointless for an all-permissive license. > Although it's no big deal whether "in any medium without royalty" is > present, it's better to use maintain.texi's current wording. If Gnulib > uses a different wording, it might reasonably be construed that the > intent for Gnulib differs from the intent in maintain.texi; but we want > to express the same intent. The intent is the same. But that doesn't require copying the same wording. Bruno [1] https://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg.git;a=blob;f=README;hb=0ed622829316ebad4e8d40642bec699209a7ff2d
in-any-medium.odt
Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
