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Is it legally “safe” to release software under The Free World Licence?

April 26, 2017Free legally licence release safe Software world

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Is it legally “safe” to release software under The Free World Licence?

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I cannot provide a formal statement on the legal safety of this licence. However, the Free World Licence contains No-Warranty (Clause 6.1) and No-Liability (Clause 6.2) clauses that are as strong as those of the GNU GPL. Furthermore, these clauses are more strongly enforced because the Free World Licence forms a contract between the software’s originator and user that invokes the no-warranty and no-liability clauses with contractual strength. In contrast, the GNU GPL does not create a contract between the originator and the non-distributing end-user, which means that its no-warranty and no-liability clauses have the status of warnings rather than of contractually binding clauses. All this suggests that the Free World Licence provides a higher level of legal safety than the GNU GPL. This said, The Free World Licence is a new licence and it may contain significant unforseen legal problems, whereas the GNU GPL is a well “burnt-in” licence.