Adium

Archive for the ‘NDA’ Category

10.5 issues

Friday, June 15th, 2007

Hey folks,

Before I start, this may all change by next week. But here’s what I/we have so far with regards to 10.5

So with 10.5 we’ve got some issues, like we always do with releases. The main problem we’re going to have here with fixing them is that folks who legally have access to 10.5 right now who are having issues are still under an NDA regarding 10.5. However, due to the GPL, any changes released in a binary must provide source code should the person request it. We typically release source with a release because that’s just the right thing to do.

So we’re between a rock and a hard place. It’s caused at least one person (a user who is not affiliated with the Adium team in any way) to question the project in general.

Here is what we’re going to do. If you have 10.5, you went to wwdc. If you spent all of the money going to wwdc, you are most likely a developer. So, we need your help fixing things. Some of our developers are at wwdc and have access to 10.5, but of course we don’t have the assortment of things with the 10.5 situation that we normally would, i.e., beta testing to a mass audience.

So, if you have 10.5 and you notice a crasher or a problem, if you can create a patch which doesn’t reveal any of the new API’s in 10.5, that would be the best way of getting things fixed. Even a patch that disables the feature on 10.5 is OK by us, if there’s no other non-compromising alternative—we’ve already done this with the Image Picker. (And yes, we will bring back the feature when 10.5 is released, since the changes needed to make it work will then no longer be covered by NDA.) If you have another solution, please post them in the comments here.

What we don’t need are tickets saying that something crashed but with no patches. We can’t do much of anything with them without asking for logging normally, which may (doubtful, I know, but still) reveal some private info which would violate your NDA in some way. Right now tickets without patches are just being closed asking folks to reopen them if they are still issues when 10.5 final is out.

Licenses suck. NDA’s suck. Ugh.

Anyhow, so if you have any questions about this, have suggestions, or whatever, hop on into #adium on freenode, or comment on this post. We’re open to suggestions.

If someone from Apple Legal were to give us confirmation that we could post commits with the new API’s in them to our subversion repo, I’d be more than thrilled.

We basically don’t want people sued over breach of NDA due to something submitted to us.