I have to approve a EULA again? Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

[znmeb]

I've been testing with openSUSE 11.2 for weeks, and just rebuilt a real box and a virtual machine with 11.2 RC2. Everything was going just peachy until a few hours ago. I refreshed the repos and did a "zypper update". It now asks me to approve an end-user license agreement! I thought that went away!

This is a big deal for me - I'm trying to build open source gizmos that I can legally redistribute with minimal hassles for the people who will be using them. If I suddenly can't do that after almost a year of being able to, it's going to put a major crimp in my work flow. Is this permanent, an accident, or just something temporary in the process of moving to a release?

[ReferenceSeete]

Are you sure it was a EULA? More importantly, if you are concerned about your ability to redistribute...it seems reasonable that you would read the license to find out whether you are eligible to redistribute. Or are there additional pieces to this situation that you haven't posted?

The document that starts "This agreement governs your download, installation, or use of openSUSE 11.2 and its updates, regardless of the delivery mechanism..." is the openSUSE license notice, it is based upon Fedora's document of the same purpose.

You'll notice that when you see the oS license notice in a GUI environment there are no options for Agree/Accept or Disagree/Decline...simply "Next". In the CLI you have to 'agree' because it's easier to fit the workflow into what already exists for that interface, not because openSUSE is distributed under a EULA.


The openSUSE license is a notice - not a EULA. If you are confronted with a real EULA, it's because you have chosen to install non-OSS like Adobe Flash or Sun's JRE.

[znmeb]

Originally Posted by ReferenceSeete

Are you sure it was a EULA? More importantly, if you are concerned about your ability to redistribute...it seems reasonable that you would read the license to find out whether you are eligible to redistribute. Or are there additional pieces to this situation that you haven't posted?

The document that starts "This agreement governs your download, installation, or use of openSUSE 11.2 and its updates, regardless of the delivery mechanism..." is the openSUSE license notice, it is based upon Fedora's document of the same purpose.

You'll notice that when you see the oS license notice in a GUI environment there are no options for Agree/Accept or Disagree/Decline...simply "Next". In the CLI you have to 'agree' because it's easier to fit the workflow into what already exists for that interface, not because openSUSE is distributed under a EULA.


The openSUSE license is a notice - not a EULA. If you are confronted with a real EULA, it's because you have chosen to install non-OSS like Adobe Flash or Sun's JRE.

1. I removed the non-OSS repository and the "pullin-flash-player" and "pullin-msttf-fonts" packages *before* doing the "zypper update".

2. It displayed the "notice" using "more", but at the end asked me whether I accepted it, with a default of "no". I did not test to see what happens on the "no" branch.

The whole point of the script in question is to prevent non-OSS software in the first place. :-)

#! /bin/bash -v

# we don't want non-OSS software at all
sudo zypper remove pullin-flash-player pullin-msttf-fonts
sudo zypper removerepo repo-non-oss
sudo zypper removerepo 'openSUSE 11.2-0' # get rid of the DVD repo
sudo zypper modifyrepo --no-refresh --all
zypper repos -d
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper update

[ReferenceSeete]

Every new release of openSUSE - that is to say every milestone, Release Candidate and Goldmaster - displays the openSUSE license notice whether you get that release via a fresh install or an update/upgrade.

The only way to see that notice once, and only once, is to install an openSUSE release and not upgrade it to another release. When using development snapshots, this is largely unavoidable since the repositories are moving towards the next snapshot all the time. I assume you will not be giving people pre-release software without their knowledge, so if you do the set-up using openSUSE 11.2 GM they will never see the license notice...although I wonder why them seeing it would be a problem since:
A) the usual software experience includes licenses and/or notices
B) those users are bound to whatever license the software is released under, even if they never see the license themselves (in many places anyway, see your local laws about the enforceability of a license in your area)

Still, if the primary issue here is concern about your rights of redistribution, you need to read the license notice.

[Beineri]

It's just a bug/unimplemented feature of the prompt: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=450003