Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Built-in flash support makes it super easy to use right out of the box.
Convenient, but in more than a few countries (Mainly the U.S.), illegal. [insert frowny face emoticon here]
Mint is just mainly one person (Clement Lefebvre) and a relatively small group of volunteer developers; in France as I recall, dressing up a standard Ubuntu install. When a distribution has something to lose, they can't very well redistribute patent-encumbered software. Microsoft and Apple presumably pay a (nominal, I'm sure) licensing fee to be able to include things like mp3/ AAC playback, DVD decoding, Java, etc.
EDIT: Nope, he's in Ireland:
http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php
ANOTHER EDIT: I found this on a forum:
Quote:
Let's examine which nation's laws make Mint legal and which don't. I'm no expert but, I happen to know for a fact that Mint, with its included and unlicensed codecs breaks the laws of the following nations:
United States
United Kingdom
European Union
Australia
South Africa
Japan
These are nations that have in effect software patent restrictions. Maybe we just don't count any more, but I'm pretty certain that Canada's supposed to be on that list as well.