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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org