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What's (Still) Wrong With UCITA
Grant Gross has an article at NewsForge outlining both changes being proposed by the The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to its version of UCITA (a model intended for adoption by the various state legislatures), and objections raised to the resulting language by Red Hat lawyer Carol Kunze. Among other things, Kunze points out that Free software projects could be effectively discouraged from releasing software if software producers are required to provide warranties -- imagine trying to provide warranties on all the packages available to Debian users, for instance, or every bit of software included with Mandrake Linux.
Amend the UCITA so that all software sold is required either:
- to provide a warranty, or
- to provide full open access to the source code so the user may modify it as they see fit.
completely at the pleasure of the software author or vendor."Provided by the management for your protection."
Idemnify authors of public domain information against civil legal threat arising from the work itself or derivative works.
That's why the UCB, MIT, and CMU Licenses exist in the first place, rather than the code being placed in the public domain.
If you want to control your code after the fact, fine: accept the liablity associated with doing that, as your cost for the payment of being granted that control. The sole reason most University developed code in these cases is not in the public domain is that a license was required to obtainlegal indemnification.
I don't think this would keep people from releasing under the (L)GPL or Artistic License or MPL, or SCSL, etc., if they felt the control they got by affixing the license was worth the cost.
-- Terry