Proposal to remove SDG

[ocdtrekkie]

This is a first pass at updating the Sandcats terms to acknowledge that SDG no longer exists and will not operate Sandcats anymore.

• I am generically using "the Sandstorm project" right now, as I am unsure how OSC would like us to refer to the project in terms. I am going to ask about it, hopefully this week.
• I noted that the Sandstorm Development Group is dissolved, and that terms for services that SDG previously offered are there for historical record only.
• I cleaned up some "Sandstorm the company" dialogue I felt was not important without such an entity.
• I removed the snail mail addresses that definitely will no longer reach someone involved with the Sandstorm project. I checked a few other ToSes on the Internet and did not find mailing addresses, so I believe it may be safe to omit these entirely.
• I relocated the venue of legal issues to Austin, Texas, which I think is closer for all parties involved. I am hoping that at least with regards to the operating of web services that are not social networks, Texas law is not significantly different.
• I noted we may also email users about updates to the terms, which I think we should do.
• I specified an effective date about a month and a half out, so if we are going to notify people via email, we have a reasonable amount of time to do that.

Note that I did not consult a lawyer, and am hoping the fact that these terms were originally lawyered and haven't changed substantially, is good enough to avoid us consulting a lawyer on this matter in advance of an actual legal action regarding this service.

cc: @zenhack

[zenhack]

I don't know that it makes a ton of sense to mess with a legal agreement when we're not quite sure who's actually party to the agreement anymore. I also have very low confidence in our ability to modify this sensibly.

[ocdtrekkie]

I am not sure we can not have terms, and I also definitely don't think we can have terms referring to a non-existent company.

OSC has a call on Thursday I am hoping to make, I am planning on asking them about it. I am exploring a few OSC projects' websites, and some do not have terms (which makes sense if they have no services at all, I suppose), some do assign responsibility to an LLC or individual (which wouldn't be appropriate here), but Qubes OS refers to itself as a Project as I did here: https://www.qubes-os.org/terms/ https://www.qubes-os.org/website-privacy-policy/ A few belong to proper foundations such as the OpenJSF, which provides it's own ToS, PP, and legal department, and I suspect that's a bit deeper into the weeds than OSC itself will ever get.

The impression I've gotten from a lot of these, is the terms Sandcats has already here is probably significantly more extensive and robust than most other projects on OSC, many of which lack direct contact info, lack provisions about things like severability, which may protect our terms from small errors we make in them, etc. My figuring is having these terms which might have errors is better than not having them at all. But we could also possibly investigate asking OSC's lawyer at our project's cost to review.

[zenhack]

I don't think it's a good use of funds to actually pay some one to fuss with this, given how low the probably of someone actually wanting to sue somebody over sandcats is. Yeah, let's see what folks say Thursday, but I'm mostly fine with this. @kentonv should obv. weigh in.

The one thing that seems arguably meaningful is the governing law/jurisdiction stuff; moving jurisdiction to Austin seems to fairly unambiguously (if implicitly) resolve the question of who the agreement is with: Kenton. Maybe that's the right answer, since he at least is actually the person operating the service right now? Swapping out the governing law seems a little iffy to me though, since I assume the point of that was so the lawyers who wrote it didn't have to think too hard about making sure it made sense regardless of which state's laws were used. And OSC is based in CA, if that means anything...

[ocdtrekkie]

I mean, I would also rather have to go to Austin than San Francisco, FWIW.

But yeah, that would be the part of this I feel most shaky on. I don't know how materially different applicable Texas law and California law is, and I imagine the venue and state law would need to match. It's entirely possible we should leave stuff in California. I don't know if OSC's location should guide this or not either.