Linux’s heart is open source. But, developers can pick and choose how much, if any, proprietary software they want to include in their distribution. Recently, the Free Software Foundation announced its latest additions to its listing of open-source purist distributions. This lead me to thinking about both these distributions and the best of the distributions that go the other way and contain a great deal of proprietary programs.

There was a time when if you wanted to be sure a Linux distribution to work on any PC you almost had to include some proprietary firmware for graphic and Wi-Fi drivers. Those days are long gone. Hardware component manufacturers tend now to either include open Linux drivers or have opened up their specifications enough that Linux developers have created drivers for their equipment.

Today, the most common reason to include proprietary software is to provide video and audio support. The most popular video and audio codecs, such as Adobe Flash; Microsoft WMV (Windows Media Video) and MP3, are proprietary. While there are open codecs, such as Ogg Vorbis, they tend not to be used very much.

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