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03.17.07

Inquiring Minds: What Has Just Changed in Opensuse’s Licence?

Posted in GPL, Law, Novell, OpenSUSE at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Several Web sites have been reporting the same news and other than speculations in the comments section, there are no answers to one puzzling question. Novell has just released a Opensuse ‘fix’ with a modified licence. No details are given as to which package is affected and how.

For a long time I have been subscribed to 4 mailing lists from Novell/SuSE, yet I fail to find as an answer there. Here is one perspective which fully aligns with mine:

Open Source, but Closed Communication

Christoph Thiel, on the release of slightly changed openSUSE 10.2 ISO images: “The reason for putting out those updated ISOs is a license issue, which had to be addressed.”

What license issue? For what package? I don’t care whether the issue was already discussed on a ML or not, but this is not an announcement to expect from an Open Source product!

Novell is not innocent, but I’m afraid the SuSE guys were already unwilling to communicate prior to the acquisition, so maybe they deserved it.

Are any of our readers aware of the changes? If so, can you please shed some light on this?

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3 Comments

  1. shane said,

    March 17, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Gravatar

    Maybe they went with the Microsoft shared source license instead?

  2. Vince said,

    March 17, 2007 at 11:59 am

    Gravatar

    The sole change was that the agfa-fonts RPM in the NonOSS addons had a pop-up EULA added.

    http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2007-03/msg00032.html

    The overall licence, and those of all other packages, are unchanged

    HTH

  3. shane said,

    March 17, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    Gravatar

    Excellent, thank you for the info.

    Do the AGFA fonts in Novell OpenOffice.org have the same EULA?

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