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

Fri Oct 15 11:40:49 CEST 2010

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, Romain d'Alverny wrote:
+
+> > 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.
+
+No one said anything about breaking French laws, in fact what we said is 
+to follow French law.
+There is no such thing as international law, only international treaties 
+that might have been incorporated into French law.
+ 
+> 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.
+
+Assuming that a board member get's arrested in the US because Mageia 
+includes software that is covered by patents is laughable, especially 
+when that same software is mirrored without problems on US hosts.
+I think anyone who is that frightened shouldn't candidate him/herself as 
+board member.
+
+> As misc said, there is no guarantee, neither definitive rule that the
+> build system (or parts of it) would be only located in France.
+
+Moving the BS would only make sense if the countries it moves to 
+provides a better legal environment, not a worse one, so this argument 
+doesn't make sense.
+
+> There is no guarantee that board members will always be in France. 
+
+As I said no one is forced to be a board member.
+
+> There is no guarantee that we won't setup affiliate not-for-profit 
+> orgs abroad.
+> Etc.
+
+If for this reason Mageia has to be a crippled mediocre product then all 
+these precautions were a wast of time and efforts too.
+There is no point in making a grand, legally sound structure for a
+useless product with a fading community.
+
+> We're going to distribute software all around the world in several
+> ways, potentially, so we must think global here, and not only local.
+
+True, but take global corporations as example, corporations take 
+advantage legal evironments offered by specific countries to achieve 
+their aims, rather than dumb down their products and services so that 
+they comply with all laws in all countries.
+
+A successfull Mageia would strive to take advantage of the countries 
+with the best laws for it's interest rather than plan according to the 
+lowest common denominator.
+
+> wouldn't have located the association in France. There are other
+> places far more interesting in this regard.
+
+And if you want Mageia to be really successful you should take advantage 
+of those places.
+ 
+>  - what do we _want_ to have in software repositories and _why_?
+
+Easy, we want the best distro possible, with the best possible out of 
+the box experience, which for many people includes all necessary codecs 
+to play every possible media file, to enable transcoding, audio video 
+production, privacy tools, encryption, etc.
+
+In other words freedom and ease of use for the user.
+
+>  - what are legal constraints that we must deal with
+> (building/packaging/distributing/using), and how?
+
+We should strive to take advantage of the best legal environment to make 
+our targets possible.
+
+>  - how can we make this a predictable process for future situations?
+
+No one can predict the future, laws change all the time so the only way 
+is to base ourselves on current valid laws and keep frexible to move to 
+a better legal environment if necessary.
+
+Opportunities not fear should be the key word here.
+
+