On Saturday, April 01, 2006 @ 11:11 AM, Kai wrote:
On Saturday 01 April 2006 07:14 am, Donald R. Bedsole wrote:
Hi, I am new to SUSE. I was using the Fedora products, but decided to give SUSE a try. I am using 10.0 and look forward to the new version when it is released. Here is my question. I do not know very much about the GPL, LGPL and how these licenses work, and I'm sure this question will reflect it. I have the evaluation version installed, and I noticed that Amarok (which is GPL) is set up by default to use the Helix engine (also GPL?) and the RealPlayer codecs (proprietary). I'm sure this is not a violation because Novell would not ship it if it were. But why is this allowable? Maybe another way to ask this is, what is acceptable when it comes to distributing and installing proprietary software on Linux and what is not acceptable?
If the company allows free distribution - whether under GPL (like KDE), LGPL (like Gnome?), or other licenses - then the company providing the distribution can release it.
Kai: Not trying to steal the thread, but just wanted to ask a quick on-topic follow up question. In this case, would it maybe be a matter of RealPlayer allowing Amorok to distribute their binary along with their (Amorok's) own open source product as a way to sort of "get the word out" about Realplayer to some who might not otherwise have looked into their product? Greg Wallace