Re: responses to licensing discussion

Mike Mascari wrote:
> Ned Lilly wrote:
> >
> >
> > The second point, forcing a click-through or some other mechanism
> > before a user downloads/installs the software, gets at the same
> > issue. As a developer, you only get the protection of UCITA if the
> > user *agrees* to the license... right now, just having it in the
> > tarball or on the CD doesn't meet that test. There needs to be some
> > proactive mechanism that signifies user acceptance of the terms, or
> > else the license is just words. The recent passage in the US of
> > digital signature legislation affirms the various mechanisms by
> > which you can do that.
>
> How does this affect the presence of PostgreSQL on RedHat
> distributions, where no such agreement is made? Would it require
> an interface (like Netscape) where the first time psql is started
> the terms are presented? How would that work if I justed wanted
> the server (started like any other service - sendmail, httpd,
> etc. through linuxconf) and used Access/ODBC as a frontend? Is
> this requirement something new?

Seems to be something new in the open source world. Most
commercial software I've seen doesn't install if you don't
accept the license terms in such a click-through way (did you
ever install some MS products?).

As a developer, I like to get the protection. So if the
wording in the tarball doesn't buy it for me, it's wasted
bandwidth and we should better remove it.

For source distributions I think it's easy to add such a step
to the configure process. A switch like --accept-license that
just suppresses the y/n question (not the displaying of the
license itself) should do it for the hackers.

So the problem left are binary distributions.

I'm in doubt why none of the other open source projects ever
felt the need to enforce license agreement in this way while
most commercial players do. Maybe it's something we don't
have to worry about, but what if so? What if we all have
already one foot in jail and just don't know? Oh boy, what
about all the patches, modules, whatnot I contributed to
other open source projects during the past 20 years? Can I
sleep well tonight?

Well, most of the things I've done in the past 20 years don't
made it that far that they became a threat for some big
player. This time it's different and I welcome any real
lawyers advice. If it means we cannot distribute binaries
unless the install procedures provide a license-click-through
feature, that might be it until they do.

Jan

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