[Mageia-dev] Mageia repository sections, licenses, restrictions, firmware etc

Fri Oct 15 10:44:16 CEST 2010

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 07:43, Olivier Méjean <omejean at yahoo.fr> wrote:
+> Le vendredi 15 octobre 2010 01:18:37, Michael scherer a écrit :
+>> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 09:57:03PM +0200, Olivier Méjean wrote:
+>> Since the only people who will have issue with this are the president ( aka
+>> Anne ) and the people who distribute this ( ie mirrors admins ), I think
+>> we should ask them and follow their opinions, and only theirs. Because
+>> we can speak of "we have no problem", we will have nothing what ever we do,
+>> because we are likely not liable. Anne and mirrors owners are. So their
+>> words is what does count.
+>
+> So is Mageia a community project or not ?
+
+Yes and? That doesn't prevent that there is an association that will
+own trademark, servers, manage money, etc. and that is a legal
+construction that may be liable, in France or in regard to
+international laws.
+
+> Then when we will talk about Marketing stuff we will follow only marketing
+> group opinions ?
+
+Who talks about marketing here? Please stay on topic. Misc is talking
+about official representatives, board members liability - not only in
+France, but abroad. We're not in Merovingian times where one was
+judged according to his original land's law.
+
+> Of course their views count, but there is a difference between the
+> responsability of Mageia association that must comply with French Laws
+
+Sure but we can't just say that. See below.
+
+> I do quite accept that Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian comply with US Law since there
+> are located in the USA, thus accepting their policy about software patents. I
+> would like that the same occurs for Mageia that is located in France.
+
+As misc said, there is no guarantee, neither definitive rule that the
+build system (or parts of it) would be only located in France. There
+is no guarantee that board members will always be in France. There is
+no guarantee that we won't setup affiliate not-for-profit orgs abroad.
+Etc.
+
+We're going to distribute software all around the world in several
+ways, potentially, so we must think global here, and not only local.
+
+If we were to follow the "let's only check local law", believe me, we
+wouldn't have located the association in France. There are other
+places far more interesting in this regard.
+
+So the question is not "where is it allowed?" and "is it allowed where
+we build it?" but:
+ - what do we _want_ to have in software repositories and _why_?
+ - what are legal constraints that we must deal with
+(building/packaging/distributing/using), and how?
+ - how can we make this a predictable process for future situations?
+
+
+Romain
+