Distros that ship restricted cidecs

[Viva]

How do they do it? Could they face legal problems for shipping mp3 codecs and proprietary drivers?

[Chemical Imbalance]

Distros like Linux Mint are legal in a lot of other countries that don't have the same legal constrictions of places like the U.S.

It is technically illegal to install the normal version of Linux Mint in the U.S. but people still do it.

[aysiu]

There are some distros based in the US that also ship with proprietary codecs preinstalled (PCLinuxOS and Mepis, for example). You could easily argue what they're doing is illegal, but they're also so small-fry that no one really wants to bother pressing charges.

[yabbadabbadont]

And then there are source based distros like Gentoo, that don't actually ship the codecs, just the source code for them. Since the actual codecs never get distributed, just built on the local machine by the user, it is probably a legal gray area. I would guess that it would fall back onto the user though, if they aren't legal in the user's location.

[XubuRoxMySox]

Then there some like Xandros, Linspire and Freespire (the free one, not the low-cost distros you pay for like Xandros and Linspire) that actually get the licenses and are legally authorized to distribute codecs, drivers, and proprietary software.

[gymophett]

Why is it illegal if once you get them you will download the codecs anyway?

[SunnyRabbiera]

Well I know Warren Woodford the creator of Mepis had some sort of deal to legally ship codecs with it.

[linuxguymarshall]

I am running #!CRUNCHBANG as my one and only OS and have been for the past week. Right out of the box it has support for DVD playback, MP3 playback, Flash (Using Adobe flash, not Gnash) and more.