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

UCITA?

[blincoln]

If, like me, you've never heard of UCITA and are looking to form your own opinion, a summary is available here:

http://www.ucitaonline.com/slhpwiu.html

Lobby group needed.

[miffo.swe]

Linux really seams to need a large lobby group that plays golf with the legislators like the comercial software industry has. Linux has a large and vocal group but a group without funds to lobby (put money in politicians pockets). There should be another way to reach to politicians but today money seems to be their primary goal in life tightly followed by power. One possible way would be to try and get the larger companies using linux (AOL, RH, SuSe, IBM etc) together into a group that looks after the interest of open source. I have a strong feeling that all the little companies combined into one entity can make a difference. Other industries have common groups that tends to thier lobbying need so it shouldnt be impossible for open source to have one either. I know there are groups out ther already but im talking about a group of companies, not individuals. Individuals are lucky if they can make even a blipp on the radar whereas if IBM and a group of other companies combined would make the radar look like a christmas tree.

More info on the UCITA

[MiTEG]

For those of you who (like me) have a limited knowledge about the UCITA, Infoworld as an excellent summary of what it is and the problems with it.

What it essentially seems to do is make EULA's legally binding and allows them to be undisclosed until after the sale is made. It doesn't seem so much anti-open source as it pro-commercial software.

Re:More info on the UCITA

[RickHunter]

You weren't around when this first came up a few years back, were you?

Let me summarize why its bad for Open Source, then. It specifies that an EULA can forcibly modify practically any aspect of contract or copyright law, and does not have to be disclosed until some arbitrary point until after the sale.

Okay, you think, all is well and good. Blatant power grab translates to more fear of closed-source software, which means more open source/free software in use. Right?

Well, the problem is that this also modifies the 'defaults' for software and what can modify those. Namely, I seem to remember that it instituted stricter liability for software. Which can only be overrided by a shrink-wrap EULA.

The GPL, BSD license, Apache License, MPL, APL, and X11 license, among numerous others, are not shrink-wrap EULAs. Totally different category of contract, in fact. Thus, there is no way for the developers of gcc to disclaim liability.

As linked by other posters, http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/ucita.html provides a very good explanation of why this law is Bad.

Re:Question about my own code

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, as I see it (and please correct me if i'm wrong) the UCITA would benifit me because my disclaimers would be legally enforcable. If the UCITA went away, then I would be stuck in a rather tricky situation where I could be held liable for all the stuff that my licence disclaims.

Actually, the UCITA contains more stringent laws on when you can disclaim a warranty, and the length to which you can do so. It does enforce EULAs (to an extent), but it also forces particular warranties onto all software, for which the distributor, publisher, and/or developer will be held responsible.

In other words, UCITA states that your disclaimers of warranty may not be legal at all, and that you may still be held responsible. Of course, the letter and most of the comments here haven't really pointed out that which is the most common issue for open source developers (since the GPL and most other open source/free licenses disclaim all warranties).

Unless...

[gillbates]

You include a click-through license that states:

1. That you are in no way liable for any damages the software may cause;
2. That in the event of litigation, you, the end user, agrees to pay all of the defendant's legal fees, transportation costs (if any), costs due to lost time, etc... (Microsoft used a variation of this in their license agreements)
3. That you, the end user, agrees that since the software is provided for free, you have no expectations regarding merchantibily or fitness for a particular purpose.

What the UCITA does is make the click-through and shrinkwrap licensing have the force of law. Though I don't like this prospect, it can be used to keep free software authors out of legal trouble.

Re:But WHY is UCITA contrary to Open Source?

[Junta]

IIRC, it not only strengthens the 'shrink wrap' licenses, but also sets a default liability. So just saying 'this comes with no warranty' in a file somewhere does not free the programmer of responsibilty. Commercial companies don't care as they are explicitly allowed to shirk this liability through their shrink-wrap license, but open source applications can't really have a shrink-wrap license, so no matter how much you deny liability, you are stuck with it..