openSUSE ditches the EULA

Several weeks ago when upgrading to a Beta version of openSUSE 11.1 I complained about the EULA that I had to agree to after doing a zypper dup.

However, recently (in time for openSUSE 11.1 RC1) the openSUSE project has dropped what is considered a EULA and switched to a more conventional License Notice. You’ll still get the pop-up, but there is no longer a reason to have to agree to a EULA.

If you’re really bored you can read the full License Notice here.

As I pointed out earlier the previous EULA (although for a pre-release version) kept you from legally sharing your DVD or downloaded source, since it reported that you were not free to distribute. However this has been changed in the most recent License Notice here:

This agreement permits you to distribute unmodified copies of openSUSE 11.1 using the “openSUSE” trademark on the condition that you follow The openSUSE Project’s trademark guidelines located at http://www.opensuse.org/Legal.

Another thing this will likely change is what actually ships on the installation DVD’s. Since it’s now free to be distributed all packages included on it MUST be marked as freely distributable. Which very well may be the biggest reason why realplayer was dropped which I blogged about a few weeks ago.

I will give credit to the Fedora team who were the original creators of the License Agreement that was modified for the use on openSUSE, and much credit to openSUSE for recommending other project leaders looking to ditch the EULA to look at current project licenses instead of wasting the time to “re-invent the wheel”.

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