| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
LicenseLicensePosted Oct 5, 2007 14:22 UTC (Fri) by larryn (guest, #3457)Parent article: openSUSE 10.3 is now available
So I understand that openSUSE is licensed under Novell Software License? Forgive me if I'm a bit behind but how could companies bundle non-GPL software with GPL software and individual who creates LiveCD is not allowed to do so?
(Log in to post comments)
License Posted Oct 6, 2007 5:23 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] From the license:
"Your license rights with respect to individual components accompanied by separate license terms are defined by those terms; nothing in this agreement shall restrict, limit, or otherwise affect any rights or obligations You may have, or conditions to which You may be subject, under such license terms; however, if You distribute copies of any component independent of the Software, You must remove all Novell trademarks, trade dress, and logos from each copy."
This is similar to what Fedora does, though Fedora explicitly allows creation of subreleases as long as only official Fedora packages are used.
License Posted Oct 6, 2007 13:26 UTC (Sat) by larryn (guest, #3457) [Link] Thanks but that wasn't what I asked.
The question was the way Novell could bundle non-GPL software with its distribution, the Fluendo mp3 plugin, agfa font, Adobe flash player, etc.
License Posted Oct 11, 2007 6:03 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] Bundling non-GPL software is easy; every distro on the planet does it. BSD software, for instance :-). (Or, more generally, any software whose license allows Novell to redistribute it.)
I don't know anything about the Agfa or Adobe licenses, though I assume Novell has done their homework. The Fluendo plugin is a weird case; the source code is free-as-in-speech, and the binary is free-as-in-beer. The binary comes with a patent license (despite being free-as-in-beer), but is not redistributable. However, Fluendo is happy to grant any particular distro the right to redistribute the binary for no charge (see http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php). So assuming Novell has signed this contract with Fluendo, they can distribute a free binary mp3 plugin all they want. However, only they have this right; if you give your openSuse CD to a friend, then AFAICT you have performed a copyright violation, and if your friend plays mp3s then they have performed a patent violation.
(Obviously this whole crazy setup is a non-starter for any of the free distros like Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/...)
|
|
||||||||||||