From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
To: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: legalese haters club
Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 17:20:58 +0900 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87siwelsid.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <525065FB.2050800@dancol.org>
Executive summary:
But why do you care? The solution (for Emacs users -- does anybody
develop Emacs with vi?) has been available since the Cretaceous Period
(more exactly, January 19, 1991) as "hide-copyleft.el".
Please leave the boilerplate alone, or you'll break the software!
P.S. I don't use it myself.
Daniel Colascione writes:
> On 10/5/13 9:52 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > | ;; GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
> > | ;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
> > | ;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
> > | ;; GNU General Public License for more details.
>
> Is this shouty bit really necessary?
Depends on which lawyer you ask. Evidently the FSF's think it's a
good idea. It's actually not shouty; the usage of all caps here
precedes the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if it precedes the
telegraph.
> Has there been a case in recorded history of a distributor or
> developer of a program being held liable because he omitted similar
> language? The SQLite people haven't been sued, after all, and they
> release their software in the public domain.
Public domain materials don't have an owner, so there's nobody to
provide a warrantee. You'd have to prove criminal negligence or
malicious intent to have a chance of recovering anything in that case.
You'd also have to prove a particular person was responsible for a
particular fault, and then find their money.[1]
None of the above applies to FSF-owned software. Let the lawyers be
lawyers, so we don't have to.
Footnotes:
[1] Well, actually the typical ambulance-chasing-type lawyer would
check the checking account balance, and only then go looking for proof.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-10-06 8:20 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 18+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-10-05 13:31 Modern conventions for structuring Emacs Lisp libraries Thorsten Jolitz
2013-10-05 16:52 ` Richard Stallman
2013-10-06 16:40 ` Thorsten Jolitz
2013-10-06 18:04 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-10-07 0:36 ` Xue Fuqiao
2013-10-05 16:52 ` Richard Stallman
2013-10-05 19:18 ` Daniel Colascione
2013-10-06 8:20 ` Stephen J. Turnbull [this message]
2013-10-06 19:21 ` Richard Stallman
2013-10-06 16:51 ` Thorsten Jolitz
2013-10-06 18:07 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-10-06 0:42 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-10-06 3:20 ` Xue Fuqiao
2013-10-06 4:47 ` Drew Adams
2013-10-06 17:42 ` Thorsten Jolitz
2013-10-06 18:13 ` Stefan Monnier
2013-10-06 19:31 ` Josh
2013-10-06 19:58 ` Pascal J. Bourguignon
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87siwelsid.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp \
--to=stephen@xemacs.org \
--cc=dancol@dancol.org \
--cc=emacs-devel@gnu.org \
--cc=rms@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this external index
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.