License

Posted Oct 11, 2007 6:03 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Bundling non-GPL software is easy; every distro on the planet does it. BSD software, for instance :-). (Or, more generally, any software whose license allows Novell to redistribute it.)

I don't know anything about the Agfa or Adobe licenses, though I assume Novell has done their homework. The Fluendo plugin is a weird case; the source code is free-as-in-speech, and the binary is free-as-in-beer. The binary comes with a patent license (despite being free-as-in-beer), but is not redistributable. However, Fluendo is happy to grant any particular distro the right to redistribute the binary for no charge (see http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php). So assuming Novell has signed this contract with Fluendo, they can distribute a free binary mp3 plugin all they want. However, only they have this right; if you give your openSuse CD to a friend, then AFAICT you have performed a copyright violation, and if your friend plays mp3s then they have performed a patent violation.

(Obviously this whole crazy setup is a non-starter for any of the free distros like Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/...)