A minor beef

[tim at registriesltd.com.au (Tim Edwards)]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Yep, Red Hat and only select others really strive to do keep the 100%
> redistributable components separate from the non-redistributable
> components.
> 
> It seems Novell does want to do this with SuSE, but as of even OpenSuSE
> 10.0 (as I've seen it), they have not yet (please correct me if I'm
> wrong, and 9.3 was the last release that didn't).
> 
> Debian has always excelled at marketing everything.  But don't confuse
> their _official_ repository "NON-FREE" category with non-Debian,
> additional repositories that add stuff to the "NON-FREE" category.

Both Suse and Ubuntu have only Open Source packages on their 
downloadable CD/DVD images, just like Redhat. In fact you'll find that 
most, if not all, Linux distros only have open source (ie. 
redistributable) software in their downloadable versions. As with RHEL 
or Centos you can add extra repos after the install to get closed-source 
(eg. Java) or questionable (eg. win32codecs) packages, for example for 
OpenSuse: http://www.opensuse.org/Package_Repositories

Far from being the exception with a few others, the way that Redhat does 
it is the rule.

-- 
Tim Edwards