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Red Hat Asks for UCITA Reversal

Posted by michael on from the fat-chance dept.

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.

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. UCITA? by blincoln · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    "...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
  2. More info on the UCITA by MiTEG · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    The future isn't what it used to be.
    1. Re:More info on the UCITA by RickHunter · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:Question about my own code by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).