Re: Yet more Non Disclosure Agreements.

Rogier Wolff (R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl)
Mon, 1 Jun 1998 10:51:40 +0200 (MET DST)

Dave Restall - System Administrator wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've now received a new NDA from PIE and as I'm not well versed in NDA's
> I would like a second opinion on it's text, consequently, I'd like to
> post a copy of the NDA to the list (it's about 10k long), are there any
> major objections to this ? I have asked the permission of PIE to post

I don't mind, as long as it isn't much longer than a few megabytes.
But I'm not average.... :-)

> it and they modified it slightly from original when I stressed that I
> wanted it to develop a SANE driver and release the drivers under GPL.
>
> So far, PIE seem to have been very positive, a few quotes :-
>
> > The aim of this agreement is just to ensure that the document that we will
> > send to you will not be distributed to anybody else without our consent.
> > Anybody who wish to have a copy of the same document will have to ask us,
> > and we will provide it to him after he signs an identical Non Disclosure
> > Agreement.
> >
> > The drivers or other software that you will develop using this
> > documentation, can be distributed freely.
>
> They would also like information back from me about how other vendors
> deal with NDA's and SANE etc. In response to my previous mail, many
> people mentioned HP, Mustek etc. for this I have two questions :-

Some (e.g. Intel) allow you to use the docs to write GPL code. Some
feel they must explicitly have the above paragraph in the NDA. Others
don't.

> 1) Could other people respond with details about how other suppliers
> divulge information.

Some of the stubborn vendors (e.g. Diamond, Netscape) were
contractually bound not to divulge specifics of what they were
selling. (Diamond had not designed the card they were stubborn about
themselves. Netscape can't ship Java or Encryption under NPL. )

Others are just stubborn. The trick seems to be to find the right
person inside the organization who will just put the docs on the
copier and ship them to you. Don't get those in trouble by publishing
what you got, and telling everybody who you got it from.

Roger.

-- 
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