Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (233 mails)

[Petr Baudis <pasky@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 02:42:29PM +0000, Roger Whittaker wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 02:57:02PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > Roger Whittaker <roger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > What principle makes this different in Germany?
> >
> > I am talking about the European law system. As far as I know, the UK
> > is part of the EU and thus bound to the European law system. I cannot speak 
> > for the current UK law wich may or may not be in conflict with the EU.
> > The US have a system that differs but the EU has twice as many inhabitants 
> > as 
> > the US and for this reason, it makes a lot of sense to look at Europe...
>
> Do you have a reference for how and why this is different in
> Europe?

Actually, I have just now remembered an elaborate analysis of GPL
validity under Czech law by a Czech lawyer; wrt. contract vs licence,
he mentions it in

        http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/clanky/fre-en.html#tth_sEc2.2

This might make for an insightful read for those interested in the
topic; I think countries within EU (except UK perhaps?) follow mostly
the same principles.

On the other hand, the general outcome of that paper seems to be that
legal enforcability of GPL is very doubtful in EU legal system and it
works more like a gentleman agreement where both the authors and users
are expected to follow the licence spirit. In this context, perhaps
the caveat about not being able to sign the contract you don't know
isn't all that important, since it seems you aren't actually making
*any* legally valid contract at all.

                                Petr "Pasky" Baudis
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx