OpenSUSE's EULAs vs. Free Software Ideals

Anonymous Coward Maximus writes with some interesting (and disheartening) bits found in recent EULAs from SUSE: "Apparently the Beta came/comes with an interesting EULA discussed in this Planète Béranger article that just makes me think where is this whole Novell/Microsoft ridiculousness going to end? One quote from the EULA to whet your appetite: 'The Software may contain an automatic disabling mechanism that prevents its use after a certain period of time, so You should back up Your system and take other measures to prevent any loss of files or data.' Hmmm... Here is the full Beta 3 EULA for you to dissect. Note that the final release has a different EULA that doesn't look that scary, but still mentions things like 'You acquire only a license to use the Software' and such." Personally, I find the "Benchmark Testing" section (under GENERAL TERMS in the final release's EULA) to be pretty irksome.

Comments

the openSUSE community

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Novell doesn't really seem interested in the openSUSE community beyond using them as free testers anyway. Build Service notwithstanding, openSUSE is built by Novell and not by its community. Bugs on the bugzilla can link via dependency to closed internal bugs and then it's just "sorry, that's internal, we'll fix it now sit quietly please".

I think there's some people with hearts in the right place even inside Novell (I'm not just talking about the Czech and German teams) but as an aggregate they don't show much sign on "getting it" where the community model is concerned.