"Lex Spoon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> With a contract that both parties have signed it's fairly easy to see >> that both parties have agreed to the choice of venue; with a public >> licence quite a lot of legal work has to be done in order to show that >> the licence has anything to do with the case. So I wonder whether such >> a clause in a public licence has any practical effect and if so, how. > > Guys, I am no lawyer, but I think debian-legal is misusing the terms > "contract" and "license". A license text is simply a proposed contract,
You are exceptionally confused. A contract is a legal agreement, with specific requirements -- typically agreement, compensation, and a few less famous ones. A license is a grant of permission. Much like a title or deed, a license may be exchanged as part of a contract -- I'll give you a license to edit this message for a million bucks --- or it can just be granted. Almost all free licenses are not contracts. I cannot think of any Free license which *is* a contract, but there might, I suppose, be one out there. Given American law requires an exchange, I can't see how. > and a license is what you obtain after you agree to follow a license > text. Yes, there is a big issue in deciding whether or not someone has > accepted a license, but once that much is established, both parties are > bound to the agreement precisely as under contract law. Not true at all. The GPL, for example, is not a valid contract. Neither is the MIT/X11 license. > Heck, you can mail RMS your signed agreement to follow GPL in your usage > of gcc, if you want. The presence of such a signature would not make > GPL stop being a license nor start being a contract. Indeed, they aren't contracts. Agreement is no more necessary to them than if I were to hand you a sandwich. -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
