dapper-commercial (was Opera 9)

[Conrad Knauer]

On 7/8/06, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> Incidentally, I'm a bit confused about dapper-commercial - it seems to
> use the word "commercial" to distinguish it from multiverse, but users
> don't have to pay to use the repository, as far as I can see. So what is
> the meaningful difference between this new channel and multiverse?

I suspect the difference has to do with licensing details regarding
redistribution; while stuff in multiverse might not be fully libre,
AFAIK the contents of the packages can all be legally redistributed.
Opera's license seems to indicate that it can't be redistributed
without permission though; if that's the case, Canonical would have
needed special permission to host these DEBs and would have thus
wanted to segregate them out from the Ubuntu pool.

I would not be hugely surprised if Canonical saw the value of the PLF
and similar groups and decided to draw up legal agreements with the
companies involved.  Consider what the PLF hosts:

Sun's Java
Opera
Real Player 10
Skype
w32codecs
libdvdcss2

The first is now in multiverse and the next two are now in this
commercial repository.  I would not be surprised if Skype also ends up
in this new repo. w32codecs and libdvdcss2 will likely be PLF-only for
quite a while though ;)

CK