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

[Tux99]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, Romain d'Alverny wrote:

> > 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.

No one said anything about breaking French laws, in fact what we said is 
to follow French law.
There is no such thing as international law, only international treaties 
that might have been incorporated into French law.
 
> 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.

Assuming that a board member get's arrested in the US because Mageia 
includes software that is covered by patents is laughable, especially 
when that same software is mirrored without problems on US hosts.
I think anyone who is that frightened shouldn't candidate him/herself as 
board member.

> As misc said, there is no guarantee, neither definitive rule that the
> build system (or parts of it) would be only located in France.

Moving the BS would only make sense if the countries it moves to 
provides a better legal environment, not a worse one, so this argument 
doesn't make sense.

> There is no guarantee that board members will always be in France. 

As I said no one is forced to be a board member.

> There is no guarantee that we won't setup affiliate not-for-profit 
> orgs abroad.
> Etc.

If for this reason Mageia has to be a crippled mediocre product then all 
these precautions were a wast of time and efforts too.
There is no point in making a grand, legally sound structure for a
useless product with a fading community.

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

True, but take global corporations as example, corporations take 
advantage legal evironments offered by specific countries to achieve 
their aims, rather than dumb down their products and services so that 
they comply with all laws in all countries.

A successfull Mageia would strive to take advantage of the countries 
with the best laws for it's interest rather than plan according to the 
lowest common denominator.

> wouldn't have located the association in France. There are other
> places far more interesting in this regard.

And if you want Mageia to be really successful you should take advantage 
of those places.
 
>  - what do we _want_ to have in software repositories and _why_?

Easy, we want the best distro possible, with the best possible out of 
the box experience, which for many people includes all necessary codecs 
to play every possible media file, to enable transcoding, audio video 
production, privacy tools, encryption, etc.

In other words freedom and ease of use for the user.

>  - what are legal constraints that we must deal with
> (building/packaging/distributing/using), and how?

We should strive to take advantage of the best legal environment to make 
our targets possible.

>  - how can we make this a predictable process for future situations?

No one can predict the future, laws change all the time so the only way 
is to base ourselves on current valid laws and keep frexible to move to 
a better legal environment if necessary.

Opportunities not fear should be the key word here.