On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 20:29, George Toft wrote:
> Looks like their adopting Debian's attitude.  Bummer.
> 
> For a company whose stated goal is to take on Microsoft on the Desktop,
> leaving this stuff out is not the way to do it.
> 
----
Actually - I think this has always been their philosophy and nothing has
changed with the exception of the mp3 player which has now been
removed...XMMS has no ability to play mp3's. Ogg Vorbis is supported.
Apparently the license holder for mp3 format is requiring licensing
payments. 

Redhat only distributes binaries for which they have the full source
code and thus things like nVidia drivers and Acrobat Reader will never
be distributed unless the companies change their philosophy which would
appear at this juncture to be highly unlikely. The problem is
obvious...once they start shipping with closed source binaries...where
do they draw the line?

Linux is making impressive gains on the Microsoft desktop for
functionality and it's interesting that RH has picked the applications
to feature in this distribution...Open Office, Evolution, Mozilla - even
when you choose the KDE window manager. This coupled with their
announced intentions to release a version of their Professional
Workstation for the X86 platform signifies that they indeed want to
offer a desktop environment for more than the linux afficianado.

Craig