Ned Slider wrote:
Presumably they make them available to anyone with a RHN subscription otherwise why would the channel exist,
yup! but most people who get that far have paid something for the access, so if Red Hat were to take on some cost for the packages, it would / could be offset against that.
I don't know what else is in Supplementary so can't comment on that, but my guess is it's mostly closed source binary distributables (eg, Acrobat Reader, flash-plugin, RealPlayer, Java? etc) that RH can't ship as part of a fully open source distro.
That is also my understanding. Licensing issues. There was a long thread about this when the Sun guys came around talking about CentOS doing a Sun's built rpm set in the Extras/ pkgs. I guess most of that would still be relevant. We could revisit if required though. Or if the situation has changed enough. I feel in the specific case of Java, openjdk address's much of whats needed.