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.”