Hi
I think that unnecessarily exposing TDF (or people doing work for it) to a risk
in a way that could NOT be fix easily & quickly would be really dumb. It is an
easily avoidable risk.
I think it is unnecessary to worry about fabricated convoluted legal
scenario without precedent.
The fact that one person is ignorant of the risk (or chooses to ignore it) does
not mean the rest of the Steering Committee are.
Did you pool the steering committee member individually ? what basis
do you have to claim that just _one person_ think that this legal
angle to force a POV is a strawman ?
Indeed, there was a meeting
that came up with the rough draft of the 2 paragraphs prepared by Florian.
There is still no mention of where the responsibility would lay if the perceived
risk did happen but as the meeting wrote it, the potential threat should be
avoided by using Gnu&Linux if easily possible.
using Linux and/or Gnu does not avoid the alleged risk. Neither own
the copyright on icons that would be displayed in a screen-shoot.
With Gnu&Linux screen-shots there is NO risk. It also means the Documentation
Team can keep doing what they are already doing = aiming towards professionally
consistent documentation.
Yes the 'consistent' argument is indeed valid... but the so-called
legal risk is a straw man
The licensing of Gnu&Linux tends to be copy-left
allowing people to copy and adapt anything they like. By contrast the Windows
Eula is very restrictive
The Eula could demand that you give away your first born child, that
would still not make that the Law.
actually the French version of the EULA for Windows 7 Basic, Section
27, spell out clearly that Eula does not trump the Law of the Land.
and people in the discussion even highlighted
paragraphs that showed that any editing of screen-shots in a way that would make
them useful for documentation would be a violation.
There was a suggestion earlier in the discussion that if TDF did get clobbered
by MS for using screen-shots on their OSes then it could
1. Let MS target individuals that produced the screen-shots or
2. TDF could counter-sue the individuals themselves
Apparently we don't even need Microsoft to conduct FUD campaign, we do
just fine on our own
The post also suggested that TDF should reject any documentation that was
produced using non-Windows screen-shots.
In the MS vs TomTom case. TomTom were forced to pay substantial damages to MS
for saving data.
What patent do screen-shoots infringe ?
And how did you get access to confidential settlement terms ?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10206988-56.html :
"Specific financial terms were not disclosed. "
[snip irrelevant US-patent non-sens ]
Yes, everyone is exposed to a large number of unknown risks of a variety of
types but this is a known risk that is easy to avoid. Why ask people to beat
their head against a wall when they could just walk around the corner?
Or just easily not enocurage those that manufacture brick wall in their path.
Norbert