NDAs and FOSS

“I recently had to sign a “Non-Disclosure Agreement” (NDA) for
the first time in a long while, and I thought I would write about
how an NDA might or might not fit in with Free and Open Source
Software.

“One of the main ideas of FOSS is to share information, and we
encourage both programmers and vendors to share as much information
as possible.

“Sometimes a vendor shares some information with developers, and
the vendor’s words “we think we are going to do this” becomes
misconstrued as “we are going to do this”. Then people get upset
when (perhaps a year later) the “promise” never materializes.

“Information like product lines that never get produced,
shipping dates that are not realized, features that never appear,
and other issues of the same ilk. If a customer of the vendor
starts building their own business cases around these plans, and
the vendor’s plans do not materialize, then the customer might be
out a lot of money. Framing this information with an NDA focuses
the concept that “this is a goal, not a promise”.

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