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legalese haters club
From: |
Stephen J. Turnbull |
Subject: |
legalese haters club |
Date: |
Sun, 06 Oct 2013 17:20:58 +0900 |
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.