undefined | Better HN

0 pointsbelorn10y ago0 comments

I have a very different question when I chose license for my software. I ask if my software might end up being used in a product where someone could get sued for sharing software online.

I would personally be fine with a new license that simply said "Be nice or don't use my software. You can't sue people who use or share this software. You can't apply for patents and sue people who are being creative and code. You can't stop people from understanding the software that they run on their own machine.". However I doubt many companies would prefer that over GPLv3 so it easier to just use a commonly understood license which Linux distributions understand and find legally acceptable.

0 comments

vog10y ago

> Be nice or don't use my software. You can't sue people who use or share this software

Would such a rule even be enforcable? If so, what's the penalty if a company sues users anyway?

I like how the GPL(v3) makes such rules enforcable by trackling them "from behind". For example, the patent protection does not work by saying "you must not sue people with your patents", which one would naively write into one's license. Rather, they say (roughly) "if you distribute the software, this includes a free patent license to all receivers." And this is just one example. There is very clever legal stuff in the GPL, especially v3.

So I guess that the GPLv3 already does exactly what you want. It just doesn't express this as directly as you would, but more "from behind". However, this is for very good reasons, as it is necessary to do it that way, to make all this stuff enforcable within the legal framework of copyright law.

belornOP10y ago

I doubt such rule would work in US courts as the legal tradition there put emphasis on exact wordings and would look for precedents which could direct the court into an interpretation.

The courts where I live (Sweden) would look more into what the author intended rather than the exact wording, so it will accepts much lesser precise wording than other systems. The downside is that you are basically asking what one judge and 3 politicians (lowest court instance) think is the authors intention, common sense in this context, and if the distributor acted with malice or not.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse