[CentOS] A minor beef

Bryan J. Smith thebs413 at earthlink.net
Tue Nov 29 23:54:33 UTC 2005


Tim Edwards <tim at registriesltd.com.au> wrote:
> What packages in the downloadable Suse or OpenSuse is not
> redistributable?

Several.  It's been about 6 months since I evaluated the 9.3
DVD from SuSE's FTP site.  I honestly don't have time to go
back through it.  But there were several packages that Debian
and Fedora would not include.

Some were the emulation and multimedia packages, and it
wasn't just a matter of "legally questionable" stuff.  Some
were things SuSE had licensed proper, so they were legal for
SuSE to distribute to you.  Before the SuSE Linux 9.3 DVD,
SuSE called it the "evaluation version" (that wasn't
redistributable) for a reason.  But with 9.3, they started
making the entire thing available via download as a DVD .iso.
 And it still included many of these licensed programs by
SuSE.

> I don't think you've actually tried many other distros have
> you?

Not in the last year, no.  But 2 years ago I got stuck with
evaluating about 20 distros that were in use.  Knoppix is one
I had to stop letting in the door for sure -- especially all
the variants people build.

> When you do you'll find that almost all, at least among the
> main distros, consist of entirely open source software on
> their downloadable CDs/DVDs.

IIRC, not even Fedora is absolutely, 100% OSD compliant open
source.  Many packages have some restrictions on
modification, etc...  But they are _all_ 100%
redistributable.

> What distros are there where you have 1 repo for
> everything? Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva don't.

The commercial Mandriva and SuSE, yes.  That is what people
have constantly been comparing CentOS to on this list.

Last time I checked, Ubuntu has some multimedia and other
things in its repositories that Debian does not.

> Yes and most other distros are just as redistributable as
> Centos or Fedora.

So they say.  But that's what this is all about.  ;->

There's not a week that goes by without someone in some LUG
complaining about what Debian, Fedora, CentOS, etc... doesn't
have that another distro does.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                | Sent from Yahoo Mail
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org     |  (please excuse any
http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ |   missing headers)



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