Legality of Fedora in production environment

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 01:22 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le mardi 15 mai 2007 à 00:59 +0530, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
> >> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >>
> >>> Even if you manage to get people to commit to a legal document in a
> >>> foreign tongue and offload the translation risk the PR fallout in case
> >>> of conflict is going to be ugly.
> >> Legal risk is different from PR risk. We shouldn't mix them.
> > 
> > Even in this case you'll probably get both.
> 
> It is probably going to rain tomorrow too.
> 
> > And exactly how a software project (composed mainly of people that chose
> > tech over literature or law) and chose a license in its own language
> > (presumably because they didn't feel confortable with English) is going
> > to produce anything but a random translation? Especially if you tell
> > them it's not binding?
> 
> How exactly are people who choose technology over literature or law even 
> going to write a proper license in their own language? If you want good 
> licenses in any language you need to talk to a lawyer. So that's the 
> process they need to follow.

Yet this is different then having a legal translation in English.

You need a lawyer that master English and knows how to express legal
concept in English but presumably related to local laws.
This is not something you can find easily in many places. Lawyers do not
need to master any other language but their own usually.

Or, you need a lawyer that Master both English and your language and
also knows about a different law system as well as his own, which is
_rare_.

There are cases where you cannot reasonably ask upstream to provide a
legally binding translated license (I'd say most of the cases).

Now you can, of course , ask them to trust licenses written for US
Common Law and let them hope they apply cleanly in their legal system.
But then, they have all the rights to decline the request.

Simo.