>Has anyone from 3Com responded to this thread? What is their
>justification for such an extreme set of conditions on the license.
Dealing with licenses, lawyers, and a number of competitors who seem
determined to steal our intellectual property is a painful balancing act.
The old way that Palm did things was to have a new license for each and
every thing that got released to developers, so there was a continual
stream of new NDA postings and developers had to send new ones in
constantly. Also, the "rules" were different for US residents versus
non-US residents. Plus there was lots of manual intervention required
along the way, new web areas and cgis, tons of our time wasted reviewing
licenses, with the developer support group fighting for reasonable terms to
not hamper developers, etc., etc.
So what we did is create a new single license, which can cover just about
everything. Once you do that, then you're done with the continual
license-signing process... notice how the Palm VII tools were thrown in
with no further effort? How about the conduit kits? And all the roms,
debug and release? We can post nearly everything that we'd want to, under
the one license. That means you get the stuff you want, faster and easier.
The OS sources are still under a different license because we need to
protect them a bit differently and better. But still, just two licenses to
do, and none in the future (at least not the near future, obviously things
could change, but you see the intent).
As to why faxes are (sometimes) not as acceptable as snail mail, well, the
lawyers say it's so. I have no desire to go to law school to find out why.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
