Linked by Steve Barnhart on Tue 18th Nov 2003 01:36 UTC
I recently picked up a copy of SuSE 9.0 Professional. I have never used or been familiar with a SuSE product before as I've only used Mandrake, Red Hat, and a bit of Debian. After using Red Hat for a while I decided to evaluate SuSE and I am now sorry for not having tried it sooner.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
I think the main "proprietary" licence in SUSE is for Yast, the excellent configuration tool (that is really at the heart of making SUSE such an easy distribution to set up). I don't have the details with me right now, but if I remember correctly the licence for it allows you to redistribute it as part of the original distribution, but if you make any modifications whatsoever then you _must_ label it as "Yast (modified)" or something similar. I'm sure this is just to clarify that they don't take any legal responsibility for works based on it, nor wish their reputation to be damaged by a possibly broken Yast that isn't labelled as being modified. It's not GPL, but I think it possibly still falls (just about) into the category of "Free Software" according to the FSF definition.
The boxed sets also contain other proprietary software that isn't available in the download edition (coming this weekend) so if you download it, you won't get these. An example is Java, which you will have to download separately from Sun's website (not the most onerous of installations).