[CentOS] A minor beef

Mon Nov 28 06:12:13 UTC 2005
Tim Edwards <tim at registriesltd.com.au>

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.

-- 
Tim Edwards