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openSUSE Sports a New License (Ding dong, the EULA’s dead…)
(23 votes, average: 4.96 out of 5)
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Just in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC 1, we’ve finished the new and improved license for openSUSE 11.1. The days of agreeing to a click-through EULA for openSUSE are over!
The text of the new license is included on the wiki, but the highlights are:
- Users no longer need to agree to the click-through EULA. This is not a EULA, it’s a license notice. We want you to be aware of your rights as provided by the FOSS licenses, so we’ll display this notice but not require a click-through EULA.
- openSUSE is an aggregate work including many open source and free software packages. The aggregate work is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, individual packages are governed by their respective licenses.
- The main DVD now includes only the software that we can redistribute freely and that you can redistribute freely.
We want to make sure that openSUSE is the easiest Linux to obtain and use — and a big chunk of that is licensing. We now have a license that presents no obstacle to redistribution, and no obstacle for modification.
We are also working on trademark guidelines that clarify how and when the openSUSE marks can be used, and we’ll be releasing those shortly.
The work we’ve done on the openSUSE Build Service and the openSUSE license is all about making it easy to redistribute openSUSE: Either as-is, or modified to suit your needs. Want to ship an Xfce or KDE 3.5 live CD? We want to make that easy. Want to use openSUSE for another project that we haven’t thought of? Again – we want you to, and we want to make it easy! (And, of course, we want you to have a lot of fun while you’re doing this — though our lawyers tell us that’s not legally enforceable.)
You may notice similarities between our license and Fedora’s. We have based our license on the license notice that is being used by the Fedora Project. We did this for a few reasons, primarily because we didn’t see any point in reinventing the wheel — Fedora’s license has worked for them, and there’s no reason it wouldn’t work for us. Reuse is one of the strengths of our community, after all.
We also “borrowed” Fedora’s license because they freely offered it, and because it also meets our needs. I’d like to thank Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields for providing assistance while we were working on this process.
We also want to thank Novell’s crack legal team for putting in the time on this. While we wound up working with an existing license, we took the long way to get there — trying to modify the previous EULA to be more friendly, coming up with ideas to create a license from scratch. As a suggestion to other projects — we’d recommend looking at existing license notices as well, rather than trying to come up with a brand new one.
We’re happy to say that you’ll be able to enjoy openSUSE 11.1’s final release without clicking through a EULA at all. The EULA is dead, long live the new and improved license notice!
(Update: Made a few minor edits to clarify.)
How can an “aggregate work” be under GPLv2 when some used licenses are incompatible with it? Eg. the Apache license or the PHP license.
To my knowledge, it can be according to copyright. The concept of an “aggregate work” is present in many important legislation systems were openSUSE software is distributed, in line with the copyright legislation there. Just to name two: europe and north america.
[quote]We’re happy to say that you’ll be able to enjoy openSUSE 11.1’s final release without agreeing to any license at all. We will display our license notice, but it is just that, a notice. The EULA is dead, long live the new and improved license notice![/quote]
You forgot to add “you were less happy when you’ll find out that you have to MANUALLY install flash, SUN Java, Adobe Reader and a few other “non-OSS” products… >:-) Now, it is a question of what happiness counts more: the first, based on formalisms, or the second, based on functionality. Novell thinks it is the first, but what about users (=normal users, not the community active members)?
Bye,
Alberto
[quote] You forgot to add “you were less happy when you’ll find out that you have to MANUALLY install flash, SUN Java, Adobe Reader and a few other “non-OSS” products [/quote].
That is not what was said. It was only said that the DVD image does not contain it. It does not mean you have to install it manually.
And: what I say is already true for all the other packages that do not fit onto the DVD Image. But that is where OBS and software install via net comes into the game. But that is also not new with this release.
=> no less happyness also wrt to “usability”.
“You forgot to add “you were less happy when you’ll find out that you have to MANUALLY install flash, SUN Java, Adobe Reader and a few other “non-OSS” products… >:-) Now, it is a question of what happiness counts more: the first, based on formalisms, or the second, based on functionality. Novell thinks it is the first, but what about users (=normal users, not the community active members)?”
A couple of things — this was widely debated on the project list. The benefits of a better license outweigh the minor inconvenience of downloading those packages. If you’ve done an install of 11.1 betas, you’ll see we’ve made it very easy to download several of those during the first update. So, it’s really no more painful than doing an update — which we would hope our users would do anyway, yes?
I’m extremely sensitive to providing convenience for users — however, distributing some of the non-Free software was not only an inconvenience for users in terms of forcing us to use a EULA, it was also a potential problem for magazines and others who wanted to help distribute openSUSE. Again, if we could do both — ship the non-OSS packages that are popular *and* maintain a single image that’s easy to redistribute, we’d have wanted to do that. However, it was not possible given the license restrictions from the non-free vendors.
[quote]The benefits of a better license outweigh the minor inconvenience of downloading those packages. If you’ve done an install of 11.1 betas, you’ll see we’ve made it very easy to download several of those during the first update.[/quote]
This is a widely shared opinion, more than a fact. Everything assumes that the redirector won’t fail, the updates will be successful, and the user does them. On the redirector I won’t repeat the discussion we had on ML, the conclusion of which was that even Peter Poeml admitted it is not bulletproof in the end. The rest is arbitrary.
About the debate, the change was debated after the decision was taken, with very small margins of actions.
[quote]The benefits of a better license outweigh the minor inconvenience of downloading those packages. If you’ve done an install of 11.1 betas, you’ll see we’ve made it very easy to download several of those during the first update.[/quote]
I’m sure downloading packages sounds easy to you, but it sounds impossible to most end users. Also, most end users don’t care about licensing.
That being said, I’m glad the EULA is dead. It was too MS-ish.
We can’t have both, all useful but proprietary software and a licence which allows redistribution. But we addresses the need of a normal user and we do see flash and the mp3 fluendo plug-ins essentially as they are heavily used. Therfor through kind of magic they will be offered with the first update. Strict open source follower can deny downloading them and stay clean the others will be happy adn can install. For acroread we think Evince and Kpdf offering already very good quality based on open source software. All the other proprietary stuff (eg. Java, SEPsesam etc.) is more targeted to the enhanced user and they normally know how to get that stuff. We think having a licence which allows redistribution is worth doing some clicks to get the additional proprietary stuff.
And last but not least for Java: you have to know what JVM to choose from (as advanced use), depending on the application you want to run with. That is more technical if you use Sun Java, OpenJDK or even other choices. OBS and packet dependencies makes that easier technically, as discussed also on the mailing lists a while ago.
Sorry, but Java for practically everyone is still SUN Java. OpenSUSE now relies on openJDK, with the results that some services are not accessible. I know SUN Java is available, but again it requires manual intervention to get it, which is a step back with respect to the previous releases.
Sorry, bad English, I meant “You will be less happy when you find out…”
This is good news! A big thanks to everyone who worked on this
The licensing never bothered me to begin with. I chose OpenSuSE out of the pack of distros out there based on its perceived merits.
You won’t win over any of the hardcore twerps in the boycott Novell brigade. But if it makes your distribution efforts simpler, then it’s a win.
Looking forward to 11.1
The updated installer is very nice, though some of the finer points of creating a software RAID took some guessing and googling. Really slick otherwise. I’m even starting to like KDE 4
Zonker – while I appreciate it’s not your area, it would be a nice thank-you to Fedora (& others) to similarly sort out the Moonlight licensing situation. At the moment, it’s on relatively shaky ground because of a covenant that doesn’t appear to extend to other distributions.
Answer to AlbertoP: remember Packman.de and a few other sites. Novell are based in US and have to pay attention to all nonsense legalese there…
The legalese has nothing to do with this decision. The decision was taken to make the DVD redistributable and to avoid “bad press” (not my words) due to the license acceptance request. I’m all to simplify and make openSUSE more accessible and easy to redistribute, but not at the cost of making things more complicated for users just to please opinionists.
Great news.
It’s time for a small program that creates custom ISO’s. A bit like Debian’s Jigdo but more userfriendly.
The idea is that the program downloads a regular .ISO and all the restricted packages that you’d like to have on your system, and then merges everything together.
Product Creator should be able to do it, but currently is not in a very usable state.
Yes, unfortunatelly. But you can still use kiwi to do it from a command line.
This is excellent news! The EULA was the primary reason I was not installing OpenSUSE. With Ubuntu, it is very easy to install any non-free stuff if I choose to do so and I’m sure it will be the same with OpenSUSE. In my opinion, OpenSUSE has made the right decision to only bundle components that are open source. Thank you to the community members who made this happen!
You say the new license is not an EULA, but the wiki page is named “OpenSUSE EULA” ?
As you can see from the history someone simply reused a previous existing wiki page.
The removal of the EULA click-through agreement was very much needed. Congratulations on being able to push this through Novell legal and all other concerned parties. OpenSUSE seems to have their minds set in the right direction: providing users with a free software computing experience for desktop computers. Software restrictions, like forbidding benchmark tests, have no place in a free software operating system.
On the topic of Sun’s Java, my understanding is that it is finally free and open software. Seemed strange that Web-Java was not included by default in the latest openSUSE beta.
If you don’t have to agree, what is the following in the license: “By downloading, installing, or using openSUSE 11.1, you agree to the terms of this agreement.” on the linked site? If I know it well, with a non-EULA copyright license you have to agree only if you redistribute the software.
All this is going to do is breed stupid remix offshoots like “openSUSE Ultimate” or “openSUSE Black edition” fragmenting the community.
Those stupid remixes sometimes take off like rockets, y’know like “Debian Remixed for Beginners aka Ubuntu”. And isn’t that the whole freaking point of FLOSS?! If you’re afraid of offshots you’ll be safe and sound with Microsoft or Apple.
I think this is a good thing. While it will be inconvinient to do an update to add all the non-Foss programs, how is that different from installing Windows? Overall it’s a great move forward.
I’d recommend having a seperated cd download for non-foss programs so you could install suse from two discs without having to go online. I think the yast installation even asks you if you have another cd source.
I’m barely agree with the decision, ’cause we have to go to internet to obtain that package. On third world (underdeveloping country), this is a hard to get facility (internet, i mean). Then, I think, we have to download driver (like nvidia blob, ati fglrx, wireless driver, or else) — that neccessary to make a PC functional. IMO, hard to agree.
It is unbelievable that since 9.3 there was no release that I coulnd’t desribe as “two steps forward one step back”. Usability is going down the drain as always. One “I agree” click now has been replaced with several clicks, downloads, etc? What progress is that? There is no more reason why I should choose SUSE instead of Fedora, unless 11.1 will boot faster. I actually thought that this article was about good news. How wrong!
A separate ISO with non-oss repo, pluggable during installation or after it, would be REALLY useful. (People in US and EU hardly understand that internet connection is a really limited facility in other countries)
There are two efforts to make easy the installation of multimedia packages in openSUSE without internet, these effort are aimed to that users that can`t pay an internet connection on third world countries, these contain multimedia packages that can be downloaded in any pc even if it doesn`t have openSUSE installed, they contain all the requiered dependencies, so all you have to do is take the pack to the pc with openSUSE and setup the local repo.
these are:
http://forums.opensuse.org/how-faq-read-only/unreviewed-how-faq/386919-opensuse-11-0-some-packages-dependencies-june-2008-a-4.html#post1899666
and
http://easgs.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/multimedia-pack-2008-para-open-suse-11
this site has a video tutorial about how to use the pack.
There’s a separate ISO with the repo already as add-on product:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1-RC1/iso/openSUSE-11.1-RC1-Addon-NonOss-BiArch-x86_64.iso
so, what do you miss?
I would just like to say thanks for changing the OpenSUSE EULA, this is a very important and fundamental change to the direction of OpenSUSE. See my wishlist request here (from November 2007), http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Wishlist#openSUSE_License
Can’t wait to see clarification of the OpenSUSE / Novell trademark.
About Java. I think I’m going to run into problems. I’ve haussed OpenSUSE to some friends (8 persons so far) and I’ve helped them to install it instead of Windows. If I’m to upgrade to 11.1 I have to make manual intervention to get Suns JDK to work. We in Sweden need to have SUNs JDK for reaching our government agency’s because they use BankID which is an electronic identity based on SUNs JDK not OpenJDK. I’ve yet to see if it’s going to break but I fear it is.
@bengan: What is the problem with java ? if you think or know that openJDK is not for you, is it too dificult to download SUN JDK rpm ?
To install a rpm in the easy way in opensuse just click the rpm once, install with yast, insert root password and that’s it. I don’t use openJDK, i prefer SUN JDK instead and installing it was never so easy and painless in opensuse before.
greetings !!!
I love this news. I always (secretly) hated that EULA. I also hate the mozilla one. They took it off for *buntu, have they (will they) take it off for openSUSE?
It’s gone in Firefox of openSUSE 11.1 RC 1.
And what about the retail box version?
I personnally have to use that mean to get openSUSE since i live in africa and cannot wait 1 week to download the dvd because of mmy internet connection (One week if the connection is alive all that time, which is somewhat a random exercise).
Will i missed all Non-OSS & proprietary softwares????
Sorry mate. The dvd included in the retail box is the same dvd everybody else will download. I think one side comes with the i386 version and the other with the x86_64 version. I believe you pay for the book included with the dvd and for support from novell.
To be honest, the retail box would be more attractive if the dvd were bundled not only with non oss software but also with multimedia codecs (from fluendo, for instance).
However with such a retail box, I would see myself not only agreeing to an EULA (which I wouldn’t mind) but also entering a serial key (In order to prevent me from installing the fluendo codecs in other machines with openSUSE), which, of course, is against the FOSS spirit and would be a violation of the GPL too.
However novell should the effort to create an iso image with non oss software and to include a cd it in the retail box with it. If they create such an iso image but is only available for download, I’ll be glad to play Mark Shuttleworth, I would download it, burn it and mail it to you through fedex for free. We would only have to work out the details.
NOTE: the above offer applies ONLY to my man hotus (because I live in Guatemala and I’m not by all means a wealthy person but I can afford to help someone)
Wrong, the retail DVD is dual-layer not double sided.
thanks for pointing out the correction, didn’t know that. BTW, I was wrong too about the add on cd with non-oss. It’s bundled!!
I object to this part and would like it removed from people who when selecting their country show they aren’t in America
As required by US law, you represent and warrant that you: (a) understand that openSUSE 11.1 is subject to export controls under the US Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations (”EAR”); (b) are not located in a prohibited destination country under the EAR or US sanctions regulations; (c) will not export, re-export, or transfer openSUSE 11.1 to any prohibited destination, entity, or individual without the necessary export license(s) or authorizations(s) from the US Government; (d) will not use or transfer openSUSE 11.1 for use in any sensitive nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or missile technology end-uses unless authorized by the US Government by regulation or specific license; (e) understand and agree that if you are in the US and export or transfer openSUSE 11.1 to eligible end users, you will, as required by EAR Section 741.17(e), submit semi-annual reports to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry & Security (BIS), which include the name and address (including country) of each transferee; and (f) understand that countries other than the US may restrict the import, use, or export of encryption products and that you will be solely responsible for compliance with any such import, use, or export restrictions.
All this fuss over a EULA? Why? Open source software is just that…open source. If you cannot find something that will make your music play, your videos run, or what have you, what options do you have? Download proprietary software or go to Windows or Mac.
There are reasons for the EULA as this keeps the legal types from breathing down your back because you’re listening to your favorite song using proprietary software. With SUSE’s change, you now have the option of either staying clean with your distro or going “dirty” and downloading what you need or want. Agreed, this pertains mostly, if not entirely to the US but how long before that constraint becomes less visible?
From what I’ve read so far, a lot of you are complaining over an update. I can understand if you have no internet. Possibly the secondary CD would be a viable option for those instances.
Outside of that, the complainers of the extra update/download sound like the spoiled child.
I enjoy Linux for what it is, the ability to expand my horizons by exploring. That’s why I like and use openSUSE as well as Ubuntu and Fedora.
This the reason that open suse will never become a major
desktop for the average person.
why use Suse when there is something like Mint 6 64 bit rc1,
everything works from the CD all codecs are there.
I have dual booted ubuntu and Suse for some time as an average
user, I rarely use Ubuntu.I have to ask who is opensuse designed for use by.
Rushman
For people who care about licenses?
Viva la revolucion!
@Beinieri
Thanks for pointing out my mistake. BTW I was wrong too about the add on cd with non-oss.It’s bundled!!
Beineri I meant, I should have had just called you Stephan, it’s easier to remember.