Open Letter to OpenSUSE & Novell

I am excited about becoming a part of the emerging OpenSUSE community, and contributing to the Wiki and possibly other projects, but I have some areas of concern.

However what that means is that all member submissions fall under the copyright of Novell, who then is not bound by the GFDL themselves (you don't need a license from yourself to do anything).

For the OpenSUSE community to grow as an Open Source project, Novell must realise that they are a partner in this project, and can not claim copyright over other's work anymore than the members of the OpenSUSE community can claim copyright of Novell's work.

The Copyright of the site must therefore change to a model where the contributors hold copyright and licenses under GFDL. (Like Wikipedia). This of course means that Novell still holds copyright of all Novell staff contributions.

In other words, we all stand equal as partners in this project.

Regards,
--Pflodo 08:36, 15 Aug 2005 (MDT)

From: Adrian Schroeter

Organization: SuSE AG

Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 05:17:24 +0200

Hello Peter,

On Monday 15 August 2005 16:36, Peter wrote: Open Letter to OpenSUSE & Novell

I am excited about becoming a part of the emerging OpenSUSE community, and contributing to the Wiki and possibly other projects, but I have some areas of concern.

However what that means is that all member submissions fall under the copyright of Novell, who then is not bound by the GFDL themselves (you don't need a license from yourself to do anything).

The current situation is that all content is under two licenses and can be used either on one or the other. ("Terms of Use" or "GFDL").

We do need this model, since we will contribute larger text documents in future from different departments (like articles from books, articles from external companies or written by our support) which needs still to be used in other places. We can't get all this content inside the Wiki otherwise (or only with a different license and locked page).

For the OpenSUSE community to grow as an Open Source project, Novell must realise that they are a partner in this project, and can not claim copyright over other's work anymore than the members of the OpenSUSE community can claim copyright of Novell's work.

The Copyright of the site must therefore change to a model where the contributors hold copyright and licenses under GFDL. (Like Wikipedia).

This of course means that Novell still holds copyright of all Novell staff contributions.

You can still use all content under the terms of GFDL like with Wikipedia in the current situation, nothing stops you from that. But I do agree that the Copyright assignment is not needed here and only causes confusions (as far as I know it has anyway no effect in various countries, due to the local law). I am in contact currently with our legal team to find a solution here.

I will tell you any outcome of this discussion, but it might take some time. However, every content can already be copied under the terms of GFDL already.

bye adrian

Update: Novell Legal gave the okay to remove the Copyright statement. We will only add it on a few locked pages, like the FAQ. All other pages gets a standard disclaimer instead of the copyright line of the pages. It will state that the content of the page may not be an official opinion of the openSUSE project or Novell.

I consider this a very good solution :)

Expect the updated wiki next week.

AdrianSuSE 08:43, 23 Oct 2005 (MDT)

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Open Letter to OpenSUSE & Novell