into electronic streams flowing thru the cosmos On Saturday 04 November 2006 11:16 pm, 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. ....."
"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....."
This bit was in 10.0 IIRC and, I suspect has to do more w/ "precautionary action when a commercial company and their lawyers who are involved in suchlike things ( there seems to always be a lawyer, or banks and floors of lawyers, where a company listed on the Stock Exchange is involved). <sigh>
"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..."
No big deal here, so LONG as they do NOT release my name and any other personal information
Aren't these somewhat strange conditions considering with we are dealing with open source here?
But the worrying part I am finding is the last condition I quote in light of Novell having gone into bed with M$.
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.
They "need" information about the computer you actually intend to use the product on , so that they can at least attempt to keep up w/ all the things that may need drivers or ???? It also lets them know what they are doing right and what isn't hitting the mark in their advertising when they know what you put the OS on.. For instance, should thousands of tablet type computers suddenly turn up w/ attempts to install the current system upon, that maybe doesn't quite work as planned and you would like the next release ( at least ) to make all the buttons and swivels and bells and whistles to work, thank you. Work out of the box , thank you very much!! But , if they take no info, w/ or w/o your name and all that personal info.. you could go years before they know you want to run it on, oh the tablet, a hand held, perhaps a phone ??? whatever.. if you as customer don't let them know it's not just suddenly something that popped into your head, but a researched future product potential ( next release or at least next major version release ) and they better get on it most rickytick! Those of us who jumped early into the multi core AMD 64 bit computers have been happily futzing w/ our new versions , including pretty nearly complete 64bit solutions . Had they not taken that info, one would be spending lots of time rolling one's own. Not a thing one would prefer to do for a whole system. -- j itsu demo doko demo