15 Jan
2006
15 Jan
'06
6:39 p.m.
On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 23:33 +0100, Cesare Marilungo wrote:
Maybe it is just because a distro that is shipped in
large quantities
should otherwise pay royalties?
They don't have to ship it, they just have to set up their installer so
it goes on the Net and downloads the MP3 packages from a server in a non
software patent country.
For example (not to beat a dead horse) the distros can't ship the Nvidia
binary driver, as this would violate the GPL (GPL code cannot be linked
with proprietary code) but some have a package where if you "apt-get
install" it, it will go and grab the driver from nvidia's site, compile
the wrapper and link it to the kernel you are running. It's still a GPL
violation, but the individual user is violating the GPL, not the distro.
Lee