The DDK is “free”, or at least free in Microsoft speak. You have to pay for
“shipping and handling”, but at $15-25 it is cheaper than the Linux books
being sold. Sounds like Mandrake doesn’t like Windows.
“Stephen Williams” wrote in message
news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> Manoj Paul Joseph manojpurayidathil-at-yahoo.com |ntdev/1.0-Allow| wrote:
>
> >
> > A couple of weeks ago, I tried to talk to the Mandrake
> > developers (xxxxx@mandrakesoft.com) about including
> > my Windows ext2 driver in their distro.
> >
> > I was told that even though it is GPL, it is not
> > free cause it requires the DDK, which is not free,
> > for compiling.
> >
> > I think they are next going to declare that a software
> > is free only if it runs on free hardware!
> > :)))
> >
>
> Different distribution vendors have different thresholds for
> pain. For example, my SuSE distribution includes acroread,
> which is not even available in source form at all.
>
> Many distributions, though, require as a prerequisite for
> inclusion that products on their disk can all be rebuilt
> using other products on the disk – a complete whole – and
> things that require a (rather expensive) MSDN subscription
> don’t exactly fit that description.
>
> There is a lot of competition for Linux distributions, so
> you can pick the vendor who has an attitude you can work with.
> You may find that other vendors could be interested, or at
> least might bundle it seperately. (Some vendors have extra
> stuff disks or download areas.)
>
> SuSE and RedHat may be a little more “business like” and
> may be more receptive. RedHat in particular does do some
> Windows work.
>
> (*) If there were competing MS Windows distributions, the
> world would be a very different place.
> –
> Steve Williams “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
> steve at icarus.com But I have promises to keep,
> http://www.icarus.com and lines to code before I sleep,
> http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep.”
>
>
>
>
