Corel Clears the Air

Innominius Cowherd gave us hook-up to a letter from Judith O'Brien, of Corel. As she says: "The restrictions on reproduction and distribution of the Beta version of Corel LINUX contained in the Beta Testing Agreement are intended to apply only to those components of Corel LINUX that were independently developed by Corel without the use of Open Source software. ".

Comments

Re:What's the timeframe, then?

[Bruce Perens]

Actually, GPL doesn't require you to publish if you are just working on something. If you distribute a binary version to someone, that someone and nobody else has the right to ask you for the source code, and you must comply. That someone then has the right to redistribute to other people, with the same obligation - give binary, must also give source on request. But that person can also elect to not distribute at all.

So, by promising to ship source to the testers to whom they've shipped binary, and by disambiguating that their beta agreement does not overlay terms onto someone else's GPL license, they are entirely fulfilling their obligations under the GPL.

Someone asked what distribution was: the conveyance of a copy from one legal entity to another.

Thanks

Bruce

Re: What did we really achieve?

[Bruce Perens]

but what goal did "we" achieve?

We kept a really bad precedent from happening. You know the story about just letting the camel's nose into the tent, and then shortly afterward the entire camel is in the tent. Some day, some company is going to deliberately run rough-shod over our copyright rights, and we'll really have to defend ourselves. We could not allow the precedent that just a little violation was OK, for a little while. I don't believe the argument that there would have been no violation, either. The way I read the beta agreement, the GPL, and the definition of distributuion, there would have been a violation.

I am also very little concerned about scaring business away from Linux at this point. Business is all over us. Corel claims to be the world's second largest company in its market, just behind Microsoft. They can smell money as well as the next business.

What I am concerned with is that the individuals who built all of this software will be overwhelmed by the giant corporations. I did my best to keep that from happening and to keep everybody, including the corporation, happy about the resolution we came to. Yes, I think a valuable goal was achieved.

Thanks

Bruce

exactly

[schon]

Considering how Corel has embraced the OSS movement, it would be pretty strange for them to go back on their word. From everything I've heard from them, they're pretty clued-in.

Corel is putting quite a few of it's eggs in the Linux basket, which (for an "old-school" company) is a pretty big risk. We should all give them as much support as we can (whether that's monetary support by buying their products, coding support for whatever software they release as OSS, or even just giving them the benefit of the doubt instead of flying off the handle.)

They did the right thing. Now, give them a break!

[Bruce Perens]

This announcement is very satisfactory. I'm quite pleased.

There's an important rule to know if you want to be a successful agent for constructive change. Once people start doing what you want, stop complaining! Corel has done the right thing and should now be congratulated and praised.

They have made it clear that the beta agreement does not restrict the distribution of any Open Source code. Not just the GPL code, where there was a legal issue. That means they consider the desires of the community to be important - they've given us more than they really had to.

I think the criticism regarding the speed at which this took place is incorrect. Corel is a huge company, the biggest software company in Canada and one of the world's largest. For such a behemoth to change its course in 4 days is certainly not an unacceptable delay!

There's also criticism because they choose to not apply an Open Source license to some stand-alone products, not containing other people's code, until those products are finished. That's their perogative. I'm sure they'll experiment with open development, but as we've seen with Mozilla, it's difficult to get community participation on something that doesn't work yet. Only now that Mozilla is useful are we seeing significant contributions from outsiders.

And yes, they said some clueless things while this was going on, and even something that many took as insulting. But diplomacy means ignoring stuff like that and just concentrating on the goal. We achieved the goal, they understand now, they conceded. What went before that is irrelevant now.

So, now it's time for us to encourage Corel.

Thanks

Bruce Perens

Calm down.

[Outlyer]

In regards to the people complaining about Corel not being open source, etc. This closed license is SPECIFIC to this being a beta test. Even the XFree86 team closes off their source for development. Public betas are not guaranteed under the constitution, so relax. They may release source when they're ready, but for stuff they wrote themselves, it's really at their discretion.

Until the final is released, chill out.Try and remember that this is not a Linux-only company, they have a lot of policies that will have to adapt to our ways, but let's give them some time (and then, if need be, freak out :)