The very first part of the scenario is bogus [LWN.net]

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 7:40 UTC (Tue) by fenrus (guest, #31654)
In reply to: The very first part of the scenario is bogus by JoeBuck
Parent article: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

actually both RH and SuSE do support binary modules... for certain modules/vendors they have cross support agreements with.

That part isn't fictional or even "future".

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The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 9, 2005 15:06 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Indeed. Mandrake did (and I imagine Mandriva does) as well. They ship
quite a bit of binary-only stuff, kernel modules, codecs, additional
software, in their "paid" versions, that they can't legally distribute in
their free for download versions.

That's actually one of the reasons I switched to the downloadable
versions, because otherwise, I was subsidizing non-free software. If I
had ANY interest in doing that, I'd still be on MSWormOS, as dumping it in
favor of Linux after a decade on the proprietary platform was no easy
task.

Eventually, I ended up on Gentoo, a community distribution, in part due to
the aftermath of trying to find an appropriate amd64 version of Mandrake
to purchase, showing my support while *NOT* subsidizing
"masters-over-me-ware". Yes, Gentoo has ebuilds for a lot of
proprietaryware, but I can avoid them (often, they'd require separate
manual downloads anyway), and as a community distribution, I can more
freely contribute, without worrying that any part of my contribution is
subsidizing closed source, except by a most tenuous of indirect threads,
that's very nearly impossible to avoid.

With a lot of distributions, the non-freedomware they ship with the paid
version is one of the big selling points contrasting it to the
downloadable version, particularly for low-cost versions that include
little or no bundled support.

Fortunately and by legal necessity, most at minimum put the slaveryware on
a separate disk, often called the "bonus" disk, or something similar, to
denote it can't be obtained in the downloadable version.

Duncan