On Sunday 05 November 2006 05:16, Basil Chupin wrote:
I don't know if the same wording is used in the licence you agreed to when you installed v10.1 but the one which you have to agree to when installing 10.2 (beta1 at least) states, in part:
"The software is protected by the copyright laws and treaties of the United Sates. ....."
Yes, without copyright the GPL is just a text file. The GPL is a copyright license
"The software is licenced to You, not sold...."
"You may not: (1) reverse engineer, decompile or diassemble the Software except and only to the extent it is expressly permitted by applicable law or the licence terms accompanying a component or the Software; or (2) transfer....."
Standard blurb. But most (in the free version all) licenses do allow you to mess with the source, so it doesn't really matter
"You understand and agree that Novell may use any feed back or information You provide and You hereby grant Novell a perpetual and irrevocable licence to use all such feedback and information for any purpose without compensation to You, provided that Novell shall not publicly reference Your name in connection therewith..."
So, if you send in something saying "man, I love this stuff, this is the best thing ever", Novell gets to use it in marketing without having to ask special permission
Aren't these somewhat strange conditions considering with we are dealing with open source here?
No, it's fairly standard
But the worrying part I am finding is the last condition I quote in light of Novell having gone into bed with M$.
huh?
Firstly, I don't see any reason why Novell has to know anything about the computer I install the OS on; secondly, you agree to a "perpetual and irrevocable licence" for Novell to use the information; and thirdly (and we already know all about this thru outsourcing), while Novell states that it won't publicly reference 'Your name' there is nothing to state that whoever it passes this information to will be covered by this qualification.
I don't understand this at all. Really, I don't. If you're that worried about misuse of *feedback*, then don't send any