[CentOS-devel] LiveCD development

Wed May 6 22:48:17 UTC 2009
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Ned Slider wrote:
>> The packages are in rpmforge so help yourself. They probably belong in 
>> Extras anyway (upstream has them in their Supplementary channel).
> 
> we cant just add everything from Red Hat's supplimentary sections to 
> CentOS - most of those packages ( I still seem to be under the 
> impression that all of them ) are in Supplimentary since Red Hat are not 
> allowed to make them public, and in 9 times out of 10 it will be due to 
> license restrictions.
> 

Presumably they make them available to anyone with a RHN subscription 
otherwise why would the channel exist, and they are perfectly entitled 
to redistribute them (the Intel firmwares) if they want under the terms 
of the Intel license. My assumption was that RH only distributes as part 
of the main distro stuff that is open source/GPL or whatever (I don't 
believe the source is available for these binary firmwares).

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.