[CentOS] A minor beef

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 13:05 +1100, Tim Edwards wrote:
> There's nothing necessarily illegal about having Java or Flash.

Java is being illegally redistributed.

> The Java licence lets you distribute it under certain conditions 
> (http://www.java.com/en/download/license.jsp) and

Which _no_ distro meets AFAICT.  No offense, I'm tired of going over and
over this on countless lists.  You might think it's just "anal," but
when you have to certify distros as being 100% redistributable inside
clients and major corporations, then you tend to care.  ;->

> Macromedia allows you to apply to distribute their software 
> (http://www.macromedia.com/licensing/).

I _never_ said Flash, although there are _some_ questions on Flash's
redistribution.

> I find it hard to believe that Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva, etc. who all 
> distribute Flash and Java packages are illegal. With any of those 
> distros, including Ubuntu, you do have to add extra repositories to get 
> multimedia codecs and DVD playback - they are not in the main 
> repositories. I just don't buy the idea that Centos/RHEL and Debian are 
> the only 'legal' distros out there.

I'm sure there are a few others.  But Fedora/CentOS and Debian are the
only ones I know of that have 100% redistributable software.

Even RHEL is _not_ 100% redistributable, only Red Hat has a license to
redistribute some things.  And OpenSuSE really needs to address the fact
that the SuSE Linux Professional it's based on it's either (and some
people are adding things to the repositories that are only going to
create headaches for Novell and the project).


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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