Am 17. Oct, 2002 schwätzte Craig White so:

> There are 2 issues that RedHat has steadfastly refused to support.
>
> Proprietary licensing & lack of full source code.

Red Hat has shipped many packages for which no source code was available.
Maybe they feel the Free Software available has reached a point that they no
longer need to do this.

> In the event of MP3, I believe that the source code is widely available
> but companies now have to pay licensing fees to use it. In the case of

When Red Hat was locking down 8.0 Thompson ( co-holders of the patent ) came
out with a press release that was interpreted to mean that clients for
reading mp3 files would have to pay a per client license. Even that doesn't
conflict with GPL and other Free Software licenses it's almost impossible
for Red Hat to enforce, thereby making them liable for 'misuse' that would
occur with their CDs.

> Adobe Acrobat Reader, Nvidia drivers and others, the source code isn't
> available and thus, none of this is included in the redhat
> distributions. MP3 was part of earlier distributions but that was before
> the copyright holder announced a licensing program.

As I say Red Hat has made plenty of stuff available. I don't see a '3rd
party' disk ( might only be in the 'pro' package ), but I have one for 6.2
and 7.0. I believe I also have one for 7.2, but don't have the full set with
me. Yes, I've PAID for my distributions :).

Back in the day they shipped a licensed version of a proprietary X server.
That was a few moons ago, though.

Red Hat is by far not my favorite distribution. I actively discourage it, in
fact. The company, however, appears to truly believe in giving back to the
community. For that I respect them. They also have many very talented people
working for them. That's by design.

> My guess is that most of the linux distro's will not include MP3 enabled
> players in the future as well.

Hopefully :).

The only thing holding ogg back is lack of hardware ogg players. I believe
those are in the works.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
#  https://www.LuftHans.com/    http://www.TOLISGroup.com/
#  ... make it clear I support "Free Software" and not "Open Source",
#  and don't imply I agree that there is such a thing as a
#  "Linux operating system". - rms