Comment by xiii1408
8 years ago
My understanding is some things (e.g. Google Chrome, Google and Microsoft fonts) can't be put in the main Arch Linux repos for copyright reasons.
8 years ago
My understanding is some things (e.g. Google Chrome, Google and Microsoft fonts) can't be put in the main Arch Linux repos for copyright reasons.
Chromium and Google's Roboto and Noto fonts are all in the official repos.
Yeah, Chromium, which is FOSS, not Google Chrome, and Google Noto Fonts, which are also FOSS.
Anything proprietary can't simply be copied over and mirrored for copyright reasons.
I wonder how other distributions solve that situation.
By being popular enough to have providers package the software for them. For example, Chrome is available from a repo maintained by Google itself.
https://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/
OTOH, you're basically giving Google root access to your machine.
Either ignore them (Ubuntu) or they just don't. For many years Debian and Fedora didn't have MP3 decoder installed by default.
Distributing them as repackaged binaries would be against the terms. I'm unsure what distros ignores the terms and packages them anyway. It is a clear liability for any larger distributions at least.