I tried to explain that above. I’ll quote:
Now since the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver is proprietary and NOT free (as per the Free Software Foundation definition of “free” ) you will NOT find it in an official openSUSE repository. Note the “open” in openSUSE.
In the case of the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver, one method of installing that driver (and there are multiple different ways to install the driver) is to add a custom AMD proprietary graphic driver repository for openSUSE. That is NOT an official openSUSE repository, because it is NOT consistent with the openSUSE packaging philosophy of mostly free open source software.
By default, SuSE-GmbH place only Free (open source) software in the ‘official’ default OSS repository (OSS = Open Source Software). There is a small amount of Non-OSS (Non-Open Source Software) in the ‘official’ non-OSS repository, and SuSE-GmbH are working to reduce the amount of packages there in the Non-OSS all the time. I think it was back in openSUSE-10.1 when ALL graphic proprietary drivers were removed from ‘official’ openSUSE repositories.
As I tried to explain above, since proprietary graphic driver software is NOT ‘free’ software, as per the Free Software Foundation definition of ‘free’, such proprietary graphic driver software is NOT included with openSUSE ‘official’ repositories. SuSE-GmbH ONLY wants ‘free’ software in openSUSE. NOTE please the emphasis on “open”.
By ‘free’ software they mean:
- software that you are free to use as you choose and to examine the software source code as you choose
- software that you are free to give away as you choose
- software that you are free to modify as you choose
- software that you are free to give away modified copies as you choose
You are NOT allowed to modify and give away proprietary graphic software. Nor are you given the source code. Hence the proprietary graphic software driver(s) are NOT free software, and hence they are NOT included with openSUSE official repositories.
Now not all distributions (nor all openSUSE users) strictly adhere to the principles of the Free Software foundation, and as such 3rd party repositories (which are NOT official) have been created for proprietary software and non-free software (free as Software Foundation definition of free).
Note we are not talking ‘free’ as in cost. We are talking ‘free’ as in freedom.
And if this use of ‘free’ looks like a ‘political’ movement, indeed for some it is (a political movement).
Now reference software repositories, if you stick with ONLY 4 repositories: OSS and Non-OSS, and Update (the 3 official repositories) and Packman (the largest 3rd party not-official repository) you will have most the applications one will want. For the remaining applications (such as drivers already built, and other apps) one can go obtain them from various custom repositories and the build service. BUT note stick with ONLY the 4 I noted, and add others only BRIEFLY and then remove them afterwards, else if one is a beginner one will almost certainly have problems due to a lack of understanding of dependencies and information/warning messages from package management.
Again, ONLY OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman (and others ONLY very very very briefly).
I hope that makes this a bit more clear ?