[Sussex] An interesting article (well I thought so!)

[John D.]

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 09:42:13 Desmond Armstrong wrote:
> > Did you buy your Mandriva box pre-installed?  Remember this guy did and
> > do you think that Dell is going to ship code that is covered by US
> > patents?
> > If you installed Mandriva yourself was there a part of that install where
> > you clicked a box that said "Download 3rd party software to play MP3s and
> > DVDs?  WARNING: Doing so my be illegal in your country."
>
> I have never seen any message about legality or otherwise.
> The multi-region part of VLC, libdvdcss2 comes from the 'penquin
> liberation front'. but the resy of vlc is downloaded from Mandriva.
> Because I subscribe to Mandriva I can download closed source software
> from them.
ergo, the "plf" are the very kind people who make available the packages that 
can't be included in official distro due to mainly legal reasons.

So it's up to you if you include their repositories or not - I'd guess that 
it'd be particularly relevant to users in the States as it seems that they 
are more "at risk" than many other users.

Though last time I played with one of the *buntu's, I seem to recall noticing 
that the plf are now also providing repositories for them as well.

regards

John D.