Fedora Basic End User Rollout Support Operation

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday 03 January 2010 00:12:03 Robert E. Martin, VCM Network wrote:
> I am somewhat confused.  I thought that as an open sourced OS, it was a
>  free license, which included the applications in the repositories.  What
>  am I missing?

You are missing the distinction between official Fedora repositories and third 
party repositories.

If you stick to the software present only in the official repositories, then 
yes, it's all ok, free, no problems with licenses, patents, etc... However, 
this also means that some otherwise typical desktop functionality will be 
missing --- no playing of .mp3 files and divx movies, among other things.

This extra functionality can be enabled by installing software from third 
party repositories, such as rpmfusion and livna. But that also means that 
legality and licensing stuff will become problematic, depending on what exactly 
you have installed and what are the laws of the country you live in.

HTH, :-)
Marko