The FSF has argued that choice-of-law clauses in licenses are incompatible with the GPL. I believe the theory is that if things were otherwise, one could effect

The FSF has argued that choice-of-law clauses in licenses are incompatible with the GPL. I believe the theory is that if things were otherwise, one could effectively apply a choice-of-law to state that a very free-software-hostile jurisdiction's laws applied to substantive issues arising in disputes over the license. I have assumed that the FSF's doctrine on this point actually grew out of concerns over one of the licenses in the complex Python license stack, the CNRI license, which has a Virginia choice-of-law clause, close to the time of Virginia's adoption of the controversial UCITA. See: http://docs.python.org/2/license.html http://docs.python.org/2/license.html (CNRI license apparently from 2001) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Computer_Information_Transactions_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Computer_Information_Tr... (indicating Virginia adopted UCITA in 2000) Note that if a license does not have a choice of law clause, that just means one resorts to default rules about what jurisdiction's law applies to a given issue. (I.e., absence of a choice of law clause does not make the underlying issue go away.) Choice of law clauses are common in proprietary software licenses (and other commercial contracts) and are generally seen by lawyers as beneficial measures to reduce interpretive uncertainty (though obviously in 'form agreements' this is to the benefit of the licensor).