Mandriva to ship Skype

Mandriva to ship Skype

Let's just remember:

• The public/GPL version of Mandriva contains only free software.


• The public/GPL version of Mandriva ships a number of free SIP-based tools, including kphone,kcall,minisip,linphone,sflphonem, as well as other internet phone tools, such as gphone (RTP, ie speakfreely), ohphone (H323), kiax and tkiaxphone (IAX ie asterisk) and internet phone servers (full asterisk stack).

  Openwengo is available in Cooker contrib (the package missed 2006.0 by about 3 weeks), so it will be available in the next version, or even in devel/2006.0 on the mirrors if anyone backports it.



• All "commercial" distros ship with proprietary packages, whether JRE, acroread, realplayer, Citrix clients etc.


• Gentoo includes many non-free applications (but AFAIK there's no easy way to avoid installing them by default, whereas on Mandriva or Debian ... just avoid the repos/media that ship non-free software). Skype is in Gentoo's portage tree, as net-im/skype, seemingly violating term 1.4 of Skype's distribution terms


• Debian non-free includes many non-free applications, it seems the reason skype is not currently in non-free is the distribution conditions Skype imposes (not the fact that it is proprietary).

So, let's not bash Mandriva for getting permission to ship Skype in their non-free version. If you don't want free software, you won't be buying the non-free version (as all the free packages available in all Mandriva versions are available on the public mirrors).

Duncan, don't let your bitterness towards Mandriva lead you to jump to conclusions about your new favourite distro ... it is doing the exact things you complain about Mandriva doing here (shipping non-free software), except it seems that they are additionally violating the distribution tems.