The following was sent to us by Judith O’Brien, of Corel
Corporation.
The talk continues about Corel’s beta testing phase for Corel
Linux and I wanted to send you our response to the criticisms that
have arisen over the past few days. Hopefully this will clarify our
beta testing phase and our commitment to the open source community.
Please give me a call if you have any questions. Thanks.
A Time For Clarification
Corel wishes to clarify some issues that have arisen concerning
the Beta testing phase of Corel® LINUX®.
The Beta testing phase for Corel LINUX, and the related Corel
Beta Testing Agreement is in no way intended to contravene the
terms of the GNU GPL or any other applicable Open Source license
agreement. The restrictions on reproduction and distribution of the
Beta version of Corel LINUX contained in the Beta Testing Agreement
are intended to apply only to those components of Corel LINUX that
were independently developed by Corel without the use of Open
Source software.
Corel has decided to restrict the reproduction and distribution
of these independently-developed components because further testing
of these features is required before distributing them to a wider
audience. As these added features will bear the Corel brand name,
we wish to ensure that they are of the high quality that people
expect from Corel.
In order to rectify some of the confusion surrounding the Beta
testing program, Corel will be amending its Beta Testing Agreement
to further delineate between Beta testers~R use of Open Source code
components and Corel-developed code. As planned, beta testers will
be receiving the source code to both the Open Source code and Corel
modifications to them within the next week to 10 days, and are free
to distribute these modifications in accordance with the terms of
the applicable Open Source license agreement.
Corel will not be providing the source code to those portions of
the Beta version of Corel LINUX that were independently developed
by Corel without the use of Open Source software. As stated
previously, once these features are deemed to be ready for general
release, Corel will make the source code available under an Open
Source licence, the terms of which will be disclosed at a later
date.
Corel remains committed to supporting the Open Source community,
and has been working closely with the Linux community for the last
few years. Corel has also contributed a significant amount of work
to the open source Wine Project, which allows 32-bit Windows
applications to run on Linux, and has worked to make Linux more
accessible to mainstream users via Corel LINUX.