What is with people and continually violating the NDA? Especially when they aren't anonymous?
I've seen so many messages from people on Twitter that I follow about what Lion contains, and what it does not. There is a pretty strict NDA in place covering the prerelease software, and there's exactly one forum (well, two, if you count Radar) where you can voice your concerns.
It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they sign. It'll lead to further secrecy in the future, and it's just disgusting how lax some people are being re: the new OS.
People's laxity towards Apple's NDAs more or less reflects Apple's laxity in deciding whether to declare a piece of software is under NDA. I mean, the iPhone SDK was under one for months after it was released to the public. As one developer put it, "I'm sitting in a public conference session hearing about the iPhone SDK that anyone can view on Apple's website, but I can't talk about what I'm hearing to the guy next to me."
Apple isn't remotely selective in applying NDAs. When anyone can get at the information, there's nothing actually private about it. If there were any kind of secrecy to begin with, people would be more concerned about preserving it.
It's like when folks post to mailing lists with signatures reading "THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND ONLY MEANT FOR THE NAMED RECIPIENT." People start to take it less seriously.
> It's like when folks post to mailing lists with signatures reading "THIS MESSAGE IS CONFIDENTIAL AND ONLY MEANT FOR THE NAMED RECIPIENT." People start to take it less seriously.
A perfect analog to the grandparent's point.
What is it with people being lax towards confidentiality notices, especially when they aren't anonymous?
I've seen so many messages from people on mailing lists reading and replying to mail with confidentiality notices. There is pretty strict language covering these confidentiality notices; they often consist of five or more lines of ALL CAPS text that's hard to miss!
It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they read. It'll lead to further secrecy in the future, and it's just disgusting how lax some people are being re: confidentiality signatures.
> It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they read.
That's where your analogy fell off the rails. Signing an NDA is a binding agreement, while reading an email footer places one under no obligation whatsoever.
I don't see where Matt Aimonetti is breaking the NDA. He just refers to information someone else posted in public. Considering that someone else had to give him (a core developer of MacRuby) a tip that MacRuby is included in Lion, I would expect that he didn't sign an NDA.
Apple is pretty secretive already. Would it really matter if they got even more secretive? I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum as you with respect to NDAs. I think it's a sad state of affairs that so many companies today use them to stifle discussion about their up and coming products...or use other legislation or agreements to prevent power users from realizing the full potential of the products they already own (EULAs + DMCA). Are there cases where NDAs make sense? Of course! Is an NDA really an appropriate reason to stifle conversation about an up and coming OS? I personally don't think so. Plus, it's just exciting to talk about new things and leak info and it really doesn't hurt anybody in this case anyway. If anything, it just builds up the fanboy marketing fervor that Apple works off of so well. To say that they are unaware of this effect's existence would be rather strange to me.
As far as being lax about caring for contractual obligations, I think it's a side-effect of living in an overly litigious society where you have to agree to umpteen EULAs a day to get anything done on a computer (and many electronic devices).
For instance, when Apple gives you a copy of Lion it is obligated to give you access to the source of every GPL'ed part of it and you must be free to redistribute it or modified versions. If their NDA prohibits this, they have no right to distribute any GPL'ed code in the first place because they are in violation of the terms of the GPL.
I'm not sure how the GPL covers a particular packaging configuration of a build of something which has GPL'd source. Sure the source can be redistributed, but the binary possibly not. In practice, this is not much of a distinction because you can build the package from the source, but in this case the source probably doesn't have anything in it saying "Apple has built this source code into OSX." What Apple has done is essentially building a binary of MacRuby and installing in a location on the filesystem of a MacOSX Lion install. None of which you could claim that the GPL allows you to by-pass an NDA over.
MacRuby is under the Ruby License. I am not sure it prohibits distributions of binaries without source. If, however, Apple decided to include the latest and greatest version of, say, bash, they would be required to give you redistribution rights along with the source. You could, then, redistribute it (thus giving informations about the next OSX) without violating the NDA.
If Apple forbids you to get the source of their GPL'ed parts and passing this source on to others, they are in violation of the GPL and their own right to distribute it is voided.
Apparently you didn't read what I wrote. Apple cannot prevent you form getting the source code, but the source code does not include information like "the binary will be installed to this location and will be considered a Mac OSX private framework." When something is considered a 'private framework' in OSX it's primarily an install location which does not change the source code as install location is usually a build-time option. Build-time options are not something that is covered by the GPL.
I've seen so many messages from people on Twitter that I follow about what Lion contains, and what it does not. There is a pretty strict NDA in place covering the prerelease software, and there's exactly one forum (well, two, if you count Radar) where you can voice your concerns.
It's a sad state of affairs when people do not care about the contracts that they sign. It'll lead to further secrecy in the future, and it's just disgusting how lax some people are being re: the new OS.