Premise: You have legally obtained a copy of some software.
Status quo: You can use the software. You're not allowed to redistribute copies or modified versions of the software.
EULA: You may only use the software if you agree to additional terms. Usage rights are restricted.
GPL: You may redistribute copies as well as modified versions as long as distribution happens under the terms of the GPL. Distribution rights are granted.
Disclaimer and limitation of liability is a very old legal aspect about trade law which from a US perspective historically originate from UK law before the time of colonization. It has nothing to do with copyright or technology.
As the story go, someone bought a mill shaft but the delivery was delayed and the customer sued the seller and wanted compensation for the delay. This in turn lead to a legal requirement to make the customer aware of limitations. When the US organization for trade (a name which is escaping me) made their recommendation based on the version of law which was "copied" over, they added that one way to do so could be to use all caps or by changing the color or font, which companies adapted by simply picking the first suggestion.
The distance of the original case of the mill shaft and some open source software thats public available on the Internet for free is quite a far one.
Its not about software, so no, it does not restricts the rights of the person using the software. It restricts the right of the consumer who are in a consumer-seller relation.
Disclaimers are about what the buyer can except and have a right to after a transaction. The product in question is more or less irrelevant, through some laws in some places do consider a free gift to also be a transaction between consumer and seller but with a price of zero. This makes the law more complicated. For example, if a baker gives out free bread samples but that happens to be bad, the baker can still be held liable. However if I give a friend a home made cookie the law could easily treat the two cases in a very different way. As much with the law it depend on the situation and the details and the expectations of everyone involved.
This is in part why some open source project do not include disclaimers. They don't consider themselves to be in a consumer-seller relation with anyone and thus do not need to disclaim any consumer expectation which could occur if there were such relation. Some lawyers disagree with doing so because of the baker example above, through there is a lot of uncertainty and a lawyers job is to consider all possible bad outcomes even those that are unlikely to happen, or as it is to my knowledge in this case, never have happened to any open source developer in the world.
In what sense? You can still use the software, you just can't expect its use to yield a particular result and sue the programmer if it doesn't live up to that expectation.
That doesn't really affect your rights: You still own the program, you may still use the program, and you may even still sue the software vendor if the program doesn't work as expected.
What the disclaimer is supposed to achieve is state that there was no contractual obligation to deliver a piece of working software. For software distributed free of charge, this might be viable, but I would find it rather surprising if such an obligation wasn't automatically implied to at least some degree by any commercial sale.
But this is above my pay grade as I'm not a legal professional or even amateur, for that matter.
That's a question that has to be answered by lawyers and judges. Personally, I doubt that blanket disclaimers really do much of anything in my jurisdiction.
In contract law it is essential that both sides get something of value out of the deal. If not, it's not a contract. This is called "consideration" and it's why e.g. you'll see on the news people pay a symbolic $1 for a failing business or a tumbledown building rather than nothing at all.
For example you can't make a contract in which I just pay you $50 per year. But you can have a contract in which I pay you $50 per year and in exchange you deliver me a girl scout cookie on the 7th of November every year.
The court doesn't (usually) care whether the deal made is a good idea, $50 for a girl scout cookie seems like terrible value, but it _is_ an exchange of two things of value.
Because the GPL spells out what you're getting and what you're swapping for it, it will always satisfy this idea of consideration. In contrast very often "click through" or "shrinkwrap" licenses don't really do so.
Why not? If I own a chair, I have the right to use it. If I own a copy of the software (that I paid for in a store, for example), then there is nothing in law that says that I cannot use it. I have rights over what I own. Nothing restricts that.
Copyright law exists to protect software writers by providing them with a means to make money making software. This law restricts my ability to make copies. There is no law that restricts my ability to use what I own.
Well obviously their contention is that you're buying a license to use the software and not the software itself. You're free to disagree but it's internally consistent.
They can disagree all they want, but it is on them to prove that I agreed to buy a license, when I am physically holding something I bought. I didn't have to sign a contract for it. Adding terms after the purchase makes it a post-purchase agreement and that is unenforceable in most western jurisdictions.
Anyway, as I replied to the other guy, Venor v. Autodesk shows that some courts have upheld "shrinkwrap" licensing. I don't think it's a settled question in US law.
That may be their contention, but this is exactly why this is fundamentally different to the copyleft case. The GPL requires none of this.
I would add that it seems pretty specious to argue that I bought a license when the license was not presented to me at the time I paid for the product and left the store, but I accept that this could be their contention.
Agreed, I would like to see some legal precident that proves GP's point.
Additionally, GPL only grants you "additional freedoms" if you're willing to reciprocate. If you want to use it in a closed source work, it very much limits your freedoms. The phrase "permissive license" exist for a reason, and it explicitly excludes the GPL.
> If you want to use it in a closed source work, it very much limits your freedoms.
It's the copyright law which prevents you from using GPL software in closed source works, not the GPL. GPL doesn't care about proprietary software at all, leaving it at the mercy of status quo. It only grants some additional rights to users and developers of free software.
