On 30/03/2015 11:24 AM, Jim Wright
wrote:
On the last paragraph, I tend to agree with Terry for
the most part, but because some of our colleagues in the EU or
other jurisdictions may have good reasons for wanting their own
law to apply, and far be it from me to tell some non-US based
coder he needs to use my law, I might allow authors to set a
choice of law which is different than a default in NY - perhaps
through the use of an external choice of law selector (a file like
I used in the UPL, a designator in the license text, or some other
mechanism).
Jim, Terry,
I find the position of lawyers on this topic to be curiously
unsupported by the facts on the ground. I understand why, in the
abstract, a choice of law provision is appealing. However, it is
clear from the data that you and your client organizations both use
and distribute vast amounts of code based on licenses which do not
have a choice of law provision.
Let's take a look at the top-10 licenses as ordered by Black
Duck[1]. You will note that the EPL at #10 is the first license to
have any choice of law provision[2]. Given that 91% of all of the
code analyzed by Black Duck is not covered by a choice of law
provision, why is it controversial for the EPL to follow what
appears to be standard and accepted industry practice?
FWIW, in 11 years in this job, I've had many more conversations
about how the choice of law provisions hurts EPL adoption more than
I have about how happy people are that it is there. Granted, happy
people aren't motivated to call.
Rank |
License |
% |
Choice of law |
1 |
GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 |
25% |
none |
2 |
MIT License |
19% |
none |
3 |
Apache License 2.0 |
16% |
none |
4 |
GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0 |
10% |
none |
5 |
BSD License 2.0 (3-clause, New or Revised) License |
7% |
none |
6 |
Artistic License (Perl) |
5% |
none |
7 |
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 |
5% |
none |
8 |
GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0 |
2% |
none |
9 |
Microsoft
Public License (MS-PL) |
2% |
none |
10 |
Eclipse Public License (EPL) |
2% |
State of New York |
|
|
|
|
|
Sum of licenses 1 through 9 |
91% |
|
[1]
https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses
[2] Indeed, you have to go the Mozilla licenses at #12 to find a
reference to choice of law. It has an interesting approach where the
defendant in the suit gets the venue and the law.
|