Red Hat Asks for UCITA Reversal

OSS advocate writes "According to this NewsForge article, Red Hat has engaged the services of Carol Kunze (ucitaonline.com) to try to convince the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to take UCITA back. There's a list of email addresses in case you want to send the commish a letter yourself." Red Hat's letter is a good start.

Comments

Re:It's bad for all consumers!

[altgrr]

Suddenly all those EULAs become legally binding contracts

cexx.org has a campaign for a Software Vendors' License Agreement somewhere - basically, you get the software vendor to agree to it (and I think that getting a T-shirt saying "By selling computer software to me, you are agreeing to the terms of the Software Vendors' License Agreement", and pointing to a website, is sufficient for agreement, providing you wear the t-shirt when you buy the software in the store), and it overrides terms in the EULA.

Of course, I'm not sure whether it's legally binding, but it could be tried...

Tomorrow in the mail

[Trepidity]

Dear Red Hat,

We have received your letter dated 29 July 2002 requesting that we rescind the UCITA regulations. Rest assured that we have been completely unaware of the deleterious impact these regulations might have on open source software; had we known we would never have adopted them at all. The Commissioners apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, and will now move to reverse UCITA's adoption immediately. Thank you for bringing these issues to our attention, and please don't hesitate to contact us again if you have any further concerns.

Sincerely,
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws