openSUSE is adopting a new license which is based on the the license used by Fedora. The new license will be used for the release of openSUSE 11.1 . “Users no longer need to agree to the license. This is not an EULA, it’s a license notice,” says Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager. This is an effort make openSUSE easy to re-distribute and make modifications. To learn more about what is new in openSUSE 11.1 check out this review of the 11.1 beta4 release.
It’s great to see this; the first release of the OpenSolaris distribution (2008.05) did the same thing.
It’s fully redistributable and doesn’t have a click-through EULA; just a license notice.
Edited 2008-11-26 21:35 UTC
Virtual box 2.0.4 is surely a feature to look for. Though through the screenshots, Suse looks more like an eye candy. what’s say
I love how people use screenshots to gauge an OS as if developers never tinker with operations under the hood.
Who needs an engine when the car is red and has a horse logo? :-p
I’ve been using VirtualBox. Not out of preference, as I preferred VMWare Server when I used Windows. I just can’t get VMWare Server installed properly in Linux. I recently installed Windows 98 SE in VirtualBox, and wow… it runs like crap. Until now, I thought the program ran alright. Totally destroyed my halfway-decent opinion of the program.
Now, okay, you might say it’s a ten year OS… it’s old. And it is. But I actually thought that was one of the strengths of open source: if someone has a desire for something, it’ll very likely be implemented; commercial decisions hardly ever tend to happen. Surely someone out there likes to play around with older OSes out of nostalgia… right? And I don’t know, when you consider how old of software runs on Windows XP (and Win9x before it), ten years doesn’t seem to be that long. And yet, I did some searching and it appears that the VirtualBox developers have no intention of improving Windows 98’s abysmal performance.
Looks like they might as well remove Windows 98 (and probably the other Win9x-based Windows) from VirtualBox’s selection of OS type. A two-hour install of the OS, fishing around for a working display driver (scitech), getting the right version, fiddling with Google for registration codes, finding Rain to reduce processor usage from the constant 100%… all that while the processor runs HOT at 100%, is ridiculous. Not to mention, again, the slowness of it all thanks to the full CPU use (which really doesn’t improve even after installing Rain–though I originally thought it would). How is that “supported?” Barely supported, maybe.
That changes my virtualization plans; I’ll probably just run Windows XP on a machine and run Win98SE in VMWare instead.
The reason I’ve chosen SUSE is that it does not bother me with “free” and “non-free” too much. It was good to have true SUN Java JDK, Flash and Acrobat out of the box. Now it is gone.
I don’t have emotional relationship with my system, I use it as a tool. Now, the tool has become less useful.
Those will still be in the repos. It’s just that the ISO images won’t bundle them.
Yes, but thats the case with nearly all distros. The point is that on SuSE, they used to be installed out of the box, elimating the (small) amount of additional effort put into making the system useful.
No. I don’t think so. Not traditionally, anyway. Though things do seem to be moving that way.
Sounds to me like OpenSuse hits a good balance. On the one side you have attitudes like the traditional Fedora one where Flash, Nvidia drivers, and “naughty” codecs are not provided or sanctioned, and the user has to have special knowledge, like “I need to go to livna.com and install a livna-release rpm to add their repo to yum”, in order to get these things, the distro devs refusing to lift a finger to help. (I think this situation has changed for the better recently.) On the other side you have distros like Linspire and Xandros silently distributing non-free stuff with not so much as a mention of their proprietary or patent encumbered status.
In the middle you have the policy, pioneered by Ubuntu, of not installing the forbidden software by default, but informing the user when they try to do something that needs it, briefing them on the pros and cons, and letting the user make a decision, facilitating them should they decide they want to install it. In short, a policy of treating users not as subjects, and not as children, but as thinking adults.
I’m not exactly sure how OpenSuse is handling this, but it sounds like maybe they want to do a little education, but without making the user jump through too many hoops to make the stuff work if they decide that they want it.
Edited 2008-11-28 02:28 UTC