Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (670 mails)

[Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@xxxxxx>]

> If you would be aware of the huge enforcement of Novell with "pushing" 
> openSUSE at the U.S. market (in real, not already "market", but the 
> pre-stage "publicity"), you would understand that the main goal is to 
> achieve "public acceptance".
>
> So it would be very helpful if the EULA could explicitely state the 
> extreme freeness I have suggested earlier.

I agree with the need of expanding that "market", but I don't think it
is the EULA that blocks that. And yes, I don't know what Novell is doing
in that direction. It is not written or discussed anywhere that I know.
It would be interesting to know however, considering we are the
community Novell is trying to expand.

However I'm in US, and all what I see are RHEL and Ubuntu. Sometime
fedora. When I suggest to try openSUSE I get all sort of answers when
someone else try to explain to me that they prefer something else
(generally ubuntu), but they never mention the lack of freedom and the
EULA. It is more related to the ease of use, the cleanliness, the
availability of software, the ease of finding someone who uses it and
might help.
A user wants everything out of the box or in a very straightforward and
automated way. We can't have proprietary drivers and codecs on openSUSE
media, and that's OK. But here we are discussing of removing what we can
have, and I don't see how this can help pushing openSUSE in the
"market".
All the proposed solutions (additional medium, automatic addition of the
nonOSS repository at installation) introduce more problems than the
advantage coming from a "user friendly" licence. I will sum them up
shortly.

Hypothesis 1: Automatic addition of the non-OSS installation source
during the installation.

This technique might, in principle, work. You start the installation
process, you are requested if you want to install also proprietary
software, and then proceed. However you assume that the user has network
access, that the network card is recognised and doesn't require
particular configuration (there is no tool to do that in the installer,
at least not easily), if the system is a laptop, you also probably
assume the user is using an open wireless network.
If your user respects these requirements, you're not done, because you
have to hope that the re-director works, and our past experience shows
exactly the opposite, especially close to release, when the load is
high. Result: you make more users unhappy than those you can attract
removing some lines from an EULA read by just a few people.

Hypothesis 2: Additional non-OSS medium.

It would not be downloaded by anyone, mainly because you don't really
need it. If you can download an additional CD, you just use the network
to install your packages.

So, if it is really necessary to remove those packages (I don't think it
is), I think the only viable solution not to make things harder, is to
move them to the repository and then introduce something that makes
their installation automatic. It might be a link on the desktop to a web
page with 1-click links, a small application with a software list.
Why this should work better than the "Hypothesis 1". It's simple: it can
be repeated if the network doesn't work or if the redirector fails.

However, whatever will be decided it needs to be simple for the user,
not for Novell or the developers. All the tricks we have to configure
repositories (too many), to install nvidia/ati drivers, additional
codecs and so on are one of the major drawbacks for someone coming from
the simplicity of distribution like Ubuntu.

Regards,
Alberto

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