Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (280 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2011 02:39:08 +0900, Naruhiko Ogasawara wrote:

> > I thought we have established that, to speak in your terms, you are
> > sitting in your kayak on dry land and the nearest river is 100km away.
> > Now because of the risk that you might slip, after your dry-kayaking
> > session, in the shower and drown in the pool around the plughole you
> > stop kayaking and rather do biking? Sorry I don't get it.
>
> Sorry I couldn't cover all of discussion, but if OWN's licensing issue
> is like as a dry-land kayaking, why Board / Novell can't handle this? 
> It's very easy, isn't it?

I think what Henne is trying to say is that there's a point at which you 
reach diminishing returns when it comes to eliminating risk.

You (or someone) say that it's 99.9% risk-free, so now you're trying to 
address the 0.1% risk that you perceive as remaining.

But there comes a point where it doesn't really make sense to continue 
trying to reduce the risk because the effort to do so takes increasingly 
more and more time to effect any difference.

The questions that I would ask are these:

1.  Has anyone actually been subject to legal action for re-purposing/
translating material that is being offered to an open source community by 
the members of that community?

2.  What are the odds that, if someone objects to their content being re-
purposed, that a simple "I don't want that being redistributed or 
translated, please take it down." "OK" discussion doesn't resolve it.

3.  What are the odds that, if that type of interaction doesn't take 
place, that an actual judge in an actual court of law somewhere in the 
world will actually not look at the case and say "Really?  You brought 
THIS to me because you couldn't work it out yourselves?" *and* that the 
lawyers getting involved would actually agree that the issue couldn't be 
mediated.

By using the dry land kayaking example, Henne is trying to explain that 
you are trying to solve a problem that has such a small chance of ever 
happening that it doesn't make sense to even continue to pursue it.

Life is full of risk.  Risks should be mitigated as much as reasonably 
possible, but you will never completely remove risk from your life.  That 
doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to reasonably reduce risk, but 
what it does mean is that one has to have a good sense of where to draw 
the line when it comes to deciding that the risk has been mitigated 
enough.

Is there a specific circumstance where something has happened that has 
caused you to be so concerned about this potential issue that has made 
you afraid to move forward with doing what you're doing because of an 
actual legal threat/challenge that's been put forth?

I'm willing to concede that I don't know your personal circumstances, but 
if I were a contributor of content that you wanted to translate, I'd want 
to have a reason for agreeing to a license that maybe wasn't my first 
choice (not saying whether it is or not, this is a hypothetical) other 
than "I'm afraid there's a 0.1% chance that someone somewhere might sue 
me at some point in the future".

To me and based on my own experiences, that seems extremely paranoid, and 
the paranoia of one individual who might be tasked with translating 
something I might right in the future isn't enough reason for me to 
decide to use the license that the translator prefers because of that 
very small chance that the translator might possibly be sued at some 
indeterminate point in the future.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand things, license enforcement 
can (and does) get enforced differently in different jurisdictions.  As 
such, EULAs (for example) are enforced differently in different parts of 
the United States, and they tend to be written in such a way as to state 
that in the event that a provision in the license is unenforceable in the 
jurisdiction, that provision is voided but the rest of the license 
agreement is still in force.

So let's say we end up agreeing that GFDL (or CC, or whatever) is the 
license to use.  Are we then going to go further down the rabbit hole and 
start narrowly parsing elements of the agreed-upon license and how it 
would hypothetically be enforced in each possible jurisdiction around the 
world where an individual might be sued for translating content provided 
by one person in one part of the world?

That seems to be the direction this is heading - because to my view, 
we've already passed the point of "addressing a reasonable risk", but 
again, maybe my circumstances are different than  yours, and you've 
actually been threatened with a lawsuit over some translation work you've 
already done.  I don't know, but if that has happened, that would be a 
useful data point to include in the discussion, because otherwise, at 
least for my part, I can't see why this is even a topic being discussed.

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson
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