On the opensuse factory forums Alberto wondered why RealPlayer was dropped from openSUSE and pointed to this novell bugzilla report
I can’t believe that it’s because of the cost issue (as RealPlayer’s website doesn’t say there’s a cost but you do have to sign a license with them). Here are some of the portions of interest from RealPlayers Licensing FAQ:
2. What are the requirements for distributing the RealPlayer or RealJukebox on my CD?
Complete the on-line registration form, agree to the terms in the license agreement and submit your registration. Once your registration is approved you will be given the location where you can download a RealPlayer/RealJukebox specifically for distribution.
Granting of a license to distribute the RealPlayer/RealJukebox is subject to RealNetworks’ approval for quality assurance and appropriateness of material and software bundle. Granting of a license is also subject to all United States laws and trade policies.
3. How much does it cost to distribute the RealPlayer/RealJukebox on my CD?
Distributing the RealPlayer is free for Windows, Mac and available Unix platforms.
Honestly, I am glad Novell has done this, and hope all others do to. It should send a big enough message to other companies that have freely distributed software that “it should be allowed without an agreement, as long as it isn’t modified”.
if you really want realplayer 11 you can download it from real.com
Unless it’s beta, in which case you can’t distribute it. Oh, that’s Novell / SuSE.
Thanks for your explanation. But I think Novell has a similar agreement with Adobe to distribute Adobe Reader and Flash.
It would have costed nothing to ask for the permission to redistribute it, and it would avoided to remove another useful application for some users.
Clearly, it is easier to remove it.
Regards,
Alberto
My guess is the content of the license. We haven’t had a look at the license and if we did that may explain something.
Freedom of choice should be up to the user and not preached by any maker. If Real makes a Linux version than it is up to the user if they want to utilize it or not and should not be governed by what a distro states. This idiotic war of words between what should or should not be utilized by a owner of a computer amazes me. I always felt what works best for the individual is the way to go. They can use proprietary, open-source, or both as long as it satisfies the need that the owner intended it for. No one has the right to tell anyone that my way is the only way and we should be telling them what works for you is the way. If our product is the one they like, great for us and great for them and lend our support the best we can, if not, there are many more to chose from.
In my, opinion, WE as users should drop support to the proprietary formats and not wait for the great corporations to decide that in our place: WE should drop mp3s and embrace ogg on a global basis, we should drop the *.doc, *.jpg and *.pdf formats etc etc. Now THAT would send a message to the industry. I never install RealPlayer: I won’t hog my system with another superfluous media player just so I may be able to watch a bunch of boring low-quality videos encoded in a pretentious proprietary format I can most certainly do without! We, as users, should stick with a handful of open formats and never write/encode/create anything in other formats. That would progressively flush away all the problems with proprietary formats, patent fees, copyright infringements and potentially even DRM. And while we’re at it, why stop at the format alone – let’s boycott their CONTENT as well! Contrary to what most people think, there IS a way to tell all those greedy corporations to go stuff themselves: just never buy/download anything from them! There’s SO MUCH public domain stuff available just a mouse-click away! And I mean QUALITY music, GREAT movies, INCREDIBLE online books, real CLASSICS. With all this wealth at my disposal, I can honestly live without the last Britney Spears video or the latest Hollywood crap, can’t you? Let’s see who they’ll accuse of violating patent/copyright/DRM then! And yes, I AM opinionated.
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I don’t like to install rpm packages “outside” yast, as yast takes care of the dependencies and updates, if I install realplayer 10 and I want to update to 11 some day, do I just install 11 and it will overwrite 10’s files, or I have to remove 10 first? …I don’t want to bother with these problems.