Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Tim Edwards <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>What packages in the downloadable Suse or OpenSuse is not
>>redistributable?
>
>
> Several. It's been about 6 months since I evaluated the 9.3
> DVD from SuSE's FTP site. I honestly don't have time to go
> back through it. But there were several packages that Debian
> and Fedora would not include.
>
> Some were the emulation and multimedia packages, and it
> wasn't just a matter of "legally questionable" stuff. Some
> were things SuSE had licensed proper, so they were legal for
> SuSE to distribute to you. Before the SuSE Linux 9.3 DVD,
> SuSE called it the "evaluation version" (that wasn't
> redistributable) for a reason. But with 9.3, they started
> making the entire thing available via download as a DVD .iso.
> And it still included many of these licensed programs by
> SuSE.
Unless you can point out some specific examples I'd say you've confused
packages that come with the download to packages that people regularly
add from well known repos after they've installed. The perfect example
of this would be mp3 support.
>>When you do you'll find that almost all, at least among the
>>main distros, consist of entirely open source software on
>>their downloadable CDs/DVDs.
>
>
> IIRC, not even Fedora is absolutely, 100% OSD compliant open
> source. Many packages have some restrictions on
> modification, etc... But they are _all_ 100%
> redistributable.
I think the Fedora people would have something to say about that:
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/
What exactly is non-open source in Fedora? Not being sarcastic - the
Fedora people would be very interested to hear of any packages that
aren't open source in their distro. I'd be interested if you could give
an example too.
> The commercial Mandriva and SuSE, yes. That is what people
> have constantly been comparing CentOS to on this list.
>
> Last time I checked, Ubuntu has some multimedia and other
> things in its repositories that Debian does not.
The commercial Mandriva and Suse (I'm assuming you mean Mandrake
Corporate Server and SLES) are like RHEL - they have packages for
closed-source software included. The downloadable Mandriva and Suse are
purely open source, the questionable multimedia stuff is in seperate
repos and isn't included on the CDs, nor is closed-source stuff like Java.
--
Tim Edwards
