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Re: Why not contribute? (to GCC)
On 24/04/2010 01:04, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
> I repeat, what is scary to lawyers is the
> "*unlimited* liability" words of the copyright transfer to FSF. [If the
> legal documents specified a very large, but limited amount, like
> US$100M, I would imagine lawyers would perceive the FSF copyright
> transfer form differently]
They might, but quite possibly in the opposite way than you would expect:
they might very well find the concrete notion of the limited liability more
threatening, being for a precise and very very huge amount, rather than the
more vague and abstract notion of an unlimited liability for "however much
that would be". Tell someone they're liable for the damage they do, they can
rationalise to themselves that they won't do much so the "unlimited" amount
will seem quite limited to them; tell someone that they're liable for a
hundred million dollars and they're likely not to hear the "up to..." part of
it. See the description of the "Forbidden toy experiment", described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
if you're interested. (Sorry, the French version of the page doesn't seem to
be as complete as the English one).
> I never met in a few seconds is -for me- very uneasy. The coding
> typesetting rules (which I don't understand; I won't be able to
> formalize them),
Indent depth is two spaces per level. At the start of a line, hard TABs
should be used for all blocks of 8 spaces, followed by any remaining spaces
for the correct indent level.
Brace-enclosed blocks: braces go on the next line after any controlling
conditional, indented one level; block content is indented two levels.
Spaces are used around all binary (or greater) operators and after function
names (before the opening bracket of the function call/prototype args).
That's about it, I think.
> And my employer's lawyers explained to me that there are even some terms
> of the copyright transfer which are illegal in France, because the
> copyright laws are so different in the USA & in France. It is called
> "droit moral de l'auteur" -I don't claim to be able to translate these
> french words;
"Moral rights of the author", see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law)
or http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_moral
cheers,
DaveK