Most HEP (and sometimes other) "academic" collaborations have 
collaboration agreements for all member institutions (or groups or 
individuals) that no work done by the collaboration may be published or 
discussed without permission from the collaboration, typically a set of 
PIs (often not a democratic vote -- one person whose name may appear on 
the published papers or public presentations, one vote -- but rather 
some of the "group leaders" or the like).  These limitations not only 
apply to announcement of research results, but (often) deep details of 
the apparatus, that these days, can include software, applications, and 
perhaps computer environments (e.g., modifications to an OS, special OS 
drivers for specific hardware, etc.).  Once it has been decided that 
something can be released, then it is -- equivalent to a NDA.  Typically 
again under this sort of NDA, all of these details may be revealed to 
the funding agency/ies (those who "pay the bills") but the agency has 
agreed not to release this in public.  In the USA, save for classified 
(weapons, clandestine services, etc.) material, those things developed 
by Federal Government agencies are "public".

That was my meaning of NDA.

On 3/5/21 4:02 PM, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>> At some point ...
> 
> Yasha you are writing some very strange stuff.
> 
>> NDA collaboration contracts that exist for the various
>> CERN/Fermilab experiments ...
> 
> if your NDA stands for "non-disclosure ...", then I must say that
> I do not believe there are any secret agreements between experiments
> and linux vendors. We do have NDAs with hardware vendors for
> access to secret documentation and secret firmware source code,
> but I never heard of any special agreements with any Linux vendors.
> 
> if you know something we do not know, please tell us more.
> 
>> ... Your observations on RHEL indicate that except for those
>> who license RHEL for fee with an IBM RH support contract, RHEL is
>> not an viable stable long-term (nor immediate) alternative.
> 
> I must put it on record that I did not say any such thing.
> 
> I say:
> 
> a) RHEL8 is here and you can use it free of charge (16 free subscriptions)
> b) you can upgrade your CentOS-8 machine to RHEL8 with minimum trouble (I posted instructions on this list here)
> c) Red Hat made a serious mistake back in December by announcing "the end of CentOS as we know it" without providing (a) and (b) ahead of time
> d) by not providing 32-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM versions of RHEL they are at a severe disadvantage in places like a typical Physics lab (CentOS used to provide both, but they killed it).
> 
> So there. There is nothing wrong with RHEL8. If it works for you, use it!
>