Sublicensing

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Aug 22 17:28:12 UTC 2003


"Peter Crowther" <peter at crowther.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > From: [...] goran.krampe at bluefish.se
> > I would hardly say that Debian's decision is based on FUD. If that is
> > what you mean.
> > They got scared of a clause, and for all I know for good reasons.
> 
> You couldn't have better expressed my exact point.  They got scared of a
> clause.  They may not know what it means, but the amount of heat (and very
> little light) coming off the IP licensing/ownership/fair use/... topic at
> the moment scared them.

It was a cold decision.  Read the indemnification clause for yourself,
and decide if you think a distributor is liable for Apple's legal fees
even if all the distributor did was deliver Squeak to the claimant.  It
sounds to me like it is.  The only counter-arguments I can think of:

	1. No one is ever going to sue Apple about Squeak, so it doesn't matter
anyway.

	2. Even lawyers would not be so vicious as to try and drag Debian into
a suit just because Debian redistributed something Apple posted on their
web site.

	3. It would be pointless, anyway, since Debian has so little money.

Also, I'd love to hear someone say I've merely misread the clause, but I
don't think so.  I frankly don't understand why it's worded that way,
and the newer APSL has quite different language.


Anyway, are any of these enough to put Squeak into the distribution?  #1
sounds like the best bet in this case, but it's not an easy sell. 
"Don't worry that you've signed your rights away, because no one is
going to take advantage of it."


Lex



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