[Mageia-dev] Mageia repository sections, licenses, restrictions, firmware etc

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 07:43, Olivier Méjean <omejean at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Le vendredi 15 octobre 2010 01:18:37, Michael scherer a écrit :
>> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 09:57:03PM +0200, Olivier Méjean wrote:
>> Since the only people who will have issue with this are the president ( aka
>> Anne ) and the people who distribute this ( ie mirrors admins ), I think
>> we should ask them and follow their opinions, and only theirs. Because
>> we can speak of "we have no problem", we will have nothing what ever we do,
>> because we are likely not liable. Anne and mirrors owners are. So their
>> words is what does count.
>
> So is Mageia a community project or not ?

Yes and? That doesn't prevent that there is an association that will
own trademark, servers, manage money, etc. and that is a legal
construction that may be liable, in France or in regard to
international laws.

> Then when we will talk about Marketing stuff we will follow only marketing
> group opinions ?

Who talks about marketing here? Please stay on topic. Misc is talking
about official representatives, board members liability - not only in
France, but abroad. We're not in Merovingian times where one was
judged according to his original land's law.

> Of course their views count, but there is a difference between the
> responsability of Mageia association that must comply with French Laws

Sure but we can't just say that. See below.

> I do quite accept that Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian comply with US Law since there
> are located in the USA, thus accepting their policy about software patents. I
> would like that the same occurs for Mageia that is located in France.

As misc said, there is no guarantee, neither definitive rule that the
build system (or parts of it) would be only located in France. There
is no guarantee that board members will always be in France. There is
no guarantee that we won't setup affiliate not-for-profit orgs abroad.
Etc.

We're going to distribute software all around the world in several
ways, potentially, so we must think global here, and not only local.

If we were to follow the "let's only check local law", believe me, we
wouldn't have located the association in France. There are other
places far more interesting in this regard.

So the question is not "where is it allowed?" and "is it allowed where
we build it?" but:
 - what do we _want_ to have in software repositories and _why_?
 - what are legal constraints that we must deal with
(building/packaging/distributing/using), and how?
 - how can we make this a predictable process for future situations?


Romain