Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Wed 26th Nov 2008 20:53 UTC
openSUSE is adopting a new license which is based on the the license used by Fedora. The new license will be used for the release of openSUSE 11.1 . "Users no longer need to agree to the license. This is not an EULA, it's a license notice," says Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager. This is an effort make openSUSE easy to re-distribute and make modifications. To learn more about what is new in openSUSE 11.1 check out this review of the 11.1 beta4 release.
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Member since:
2005-07-24
No. I don't think so. Not traditionally, anyway. Though things do seem to be moving that way.
Sounds to me like OpenSuse hits a good balance. On the one side you have attitudes like the traditional Fedora one where Flash, Nvidia drivers, and "naughty" codecs are not provided or sanctioned, and the user has to have special knowledge, like "I need to go to livna.com and install a livna-release rpm to add their repo to yum", in order to get these things, the distro devs refusing to lift a finger to help. (I think this situation has changed for the better recently.) On the other side you have distros like Linspire and Xandros silently distributing non-free stuff with not so much as a mention of their proprietary or patent encumbered status.
In the middle you have the policy, pioneered by Ubuntu, of not installing the forbidden software by default, but informing the user when they try to do something that needs it, briefing them on the pros and cons, and letting the user make a decision, facilitating them should they decide they want to install it. In short, a policy of treating users not as subjects, and not as children, but as thinking adults.
I'm not exactly sure how OpenSuse is handling this, but it sounds like maybe they want to do a little education, but without making the user jump through too many hoops to make the stuff work if they decide that they want it.
Edited 2008-11-28 02:28 UTC