Open Letter Response to the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Community

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News Brief

09/23/2002 —

As an active contributing member of the Open Source community, SUSE has always welcomed any opinions on how the community can improve its work together.

With regard to the closed beta, we consider this a natural part of UnitedLinux internal development, with an open beta, available to all in the very near future. Regardless, it is the position of SUSE that we have acted in compliance with the GPL in running our closed beta tests. To put any doubts of this to rest, we offer the following excerpt from the NDA used in our closed beta program.

7.The receiving Party shall have no obligations or restrictions with respect to any Proprietary Information which the receiving Party can prove:

has come into the public domain prior to, or after the disclosure thereof and in such cone through no wrongful act of the receiving Party; or

is already known to the receiving Party, as evidenced by written documentation in the files of the receiving Party; or

has been lawfully received from a third party without restrictions or breach of this Agreement; or

has been or is published without violation of this Agreement; or

is independently developed in good faith, by employees of the receiving Party who did not have access to the Proprietary Information; or

is approved for release or use by written authorisation of the disclosing Party; or

is not properly designated or confirmed as proprietary.

As such, a counterparty has the right to refer to the GPL and freely redistribute any GPL copyrighted code. Further, the beta software itself makes numerous references to the GPL; and was distributed with both the binaries and the source.

We thank everyone for their interest in UnitedLinux, as well as continued feedback.

SUSE Linux AG

You can download a copy of the NDA used for the Companies of UnitedLinux closed beta program by clicking on one of the links below:

Press Contact:
Jasmin Ul-Haque
Novell, Inc
Phone: +44 (0)1344 326-900
E-mail: juh@novell.com