[sf-lug] SF-LUG meets Sunday 3 September 2017

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Not quite what they are saying at the Web page.

It's funny that you should say that, because I had just carefully read
(among other things) that exact, speciifc Web page when I wrote that.

> I was reminded of Mandriva which supplied similar proprietary tools
> and I could have written something similar when I was using it.  

Almost all Linux distributions supply proprietary tools.

As I was saying, proprietary code divides into two categories, those
codebases that may be freely redistributed and those that for various
reasons may not.  The latter are bundled, if the licensing terms permit,
only in per-seat licensed Linux distributions that we used to called
'boxed set' distributions such as SUSE Professional, etc.

As it turns out, though, Black Box Enterprise Linux, with or without a
~$50/year support contract, omits those and includes only
_redistributable_ hardware drivers, firmware BLOBs, and A/V codecs --
which is why the ISOs are freely available for download rather than
per-seat licensed the way SUSE Profesional was back in the day.

> As a matter of fact at the time I did tell people that I was using
> Mandriva for very much the same reasons.
> <http://www.blacklablinux.org/> and to quote:

Which says what I summarised.

> Now you note that "running programs to watch videos, music and ebooks"
> can be done without proprietary programs but they are all copyright
> protected materials which cannot be watched without either special
> knowledge or those proprietary programs.  

And your point?  PC/Open Systems LLC, chooses to bundle proprietary
code, and doubtless also code that is proprietary on grounds of patent
encumbrance despite copyright licensing, for sundry reasons anyway.  
(They also bundle proprietary hardware _drivers_, as mentioned.)


> The proprietary programs allow/**//*lega*//*l */decoding of protected
> materials. 

This doesn't in any way at all differ from what I said.

Anyway, my point was to correct your characterisation, which seemed
quite surprising when I read it, so I investigated and found it to have
some factual errors.   You're welcome!