Another Unofficial UbuntuGuide?

[Derek Broughton]

hometoast wrote:

> Wouldn't it be enought to present the user the license upon installation
> with the options something like, [Yes - install this forsaken codec] [No -
> I'll use ogg]??

No.

> Is this legally different than putting instructions on the web on how to
> go about doing it manually? ITs not rhetorical, I reall don't know how
> that is different.

Take Sun Java, for instance (only because this is one I know the details
of).  Sun's license makes it freely available, but you _MUST_ download it
from the official download site, and you must agree to the license terms.
Therefore, just presenting the license to the user at install time would
not be sufficient. Under those conditions, it is perfectly proper to point
someone to the sun download site.  The best any linux distro can do, then
is to create a package that goes out to Sun and downloads the real thing.

What is legitimate depends entirely on the actual license.  For any distro
to point users to libdvdcss for playing DVDs is almost certainly a
violation of American laws - yet not a violation in most other places.
-- 
derek