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Corel Clears the Air

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-at-the-bottom-of-their-shoe dept.

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. ".

1 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. They did the right thing. Now, give them a break! by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5
    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

    --
    Bruce Perens.