From owner-freebsd-newbies Tue Jan 9 12:29:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from imo-r12.mail.aol.com (imo-r12.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EAE7337B400 for ; Tue, 9 Jan 2001 12:29:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from GLOBALLINK2001@aol.com by imo-r12.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.35.) id n.93.54d3605 (18409) for ; Tue, 9 Jan 2001 15:29:29 -0500 (EST) From: GLOBALLINK2001@aol.com Message-ID: <93.54d3605.278ccea8@aol.com> Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 15:29:28 EST Subject: Re: any Linux distros which are not Open Source? To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 59 Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org hey guys... ok maybe this is what they where saying... 1.) SuSE Linux can not be downloaded for free off the net... you can download only a "evaluation copy" this is what i think he was atlking about, in which case he was confusing "free of charge" with open source. 2.) If he really knew what he was talking about (and i doubt this) maybe he meant that in the last few years they have adopted a plan where they make special "arrangments" with hardware manufactuers, where drivers are not covered by the GPL, because being forced to give source away scares the companies, under this agreement many device drivers now are closed source, which "technically" means that there are components to just about every linux kernel which are closed source, this has been all the rage in the linux community lately, and i dont agree with it, that is just my opinion, i am happy to see FreeBSD does not make these "arrangments". To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message