BSD family of licenses and consumer rights

[6502]

For OP and OP's lawers, maybe to Portguese, with "assured to be legally 100% equivalent with original English one by US and Brazilian highest courts".

I see OP is writing in English here and writes very long posts. It seems he has no need to translate 4 sentences of BSD license in Portuguese. His problem is other and this topic needs lock.

 

[OpenFreeNet]

The confusion is due to how copyright law and consumer protection law address different legal interests.

Ok, enlighten us then...

Copyright law shall define the permissions and conditions governing the use of copyrighted works.

Ok, and SONY is respecting it...

Consumer protection law shall evaluate whether representations accompanying products are deceptive or unfair to consumers.

Ok, and this is the subject of SONY EULA...

The same BSD license may be analyzed under copyright law for the legal permissions,

Ok.

and, if reproduced/retained as part of a commercial transaction, under consumer protection law for the conveying representations.

Ok. SONY hasn't deprived theirs consumers of any rights regarding the FreeBSD code (i.e. they can still use it), and SONY consumers have no rights on SONY patches and SONY derivative work.

After all these posts, it is unclear which part of the BSD license oblige SONY to release the source code of its patches, and with which license. If it is not clear now, it will not clear forever, probably.

 

[OpenFreeNet]

Not many stipulate where you're supposed to get the software itself from at all. [...] The GPL is one of the notable exceptions that put an obligation on the entity that provides you with binaries. It needs to be extremely explicit about those terms though, because in no jurisdiction are they implied and they are very VERY much the exception to the rule.

Obviously the GPL is explicit about how sharing the source code of modifications, because otherwise licensees can use modified GPL code in a binary-only product, and this would be a loophole. Permissive licensees does not need this, because you share the source code only if you want.