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.