Bryan J. Smith wrote:
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.
By who? Dag has a Jre package for Centos/RHEL, Ubuntu has the java-package from Debian which just runs the Sun Java installer, Mandriva and Suse have their Java packages for paying customers. If its all illegal Sun would have kicked up a fuss long before now, and companies which are very cautious about this kind of thing (eg. Novell doesn't even include MP3 in Suse anymore) would not be going against them.
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).
All these distros (Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuse) come as CDs/DVDs of entirely open source software when you download them. If you pay for the boxed set (Mandriva, Suse) or club membership (Mandriva) you get CDs or DVDs with closed source software in them too - like Java. For all these distros you can optionally add extra repos to get potentially illegal stuff like DVD playing, codecs etc. Same as you do with Centos/RHEL.