Posted: Sat May 12, 2007 4:42 pm
For some patent and/or copyright reasons not all stuff is directly available in the repos. E.g. some DVD codecs, some peer-to-peer software, and lots of proprietary stuff will not and cannot ever be available via a distro's official repo. But then again those patents and copyrights are not valid everywhere; particularly here in Europe most US software patents are either moot or not valid. So that's why the creators of various distributions (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, maybe Mint too?) don't put all those "goodies" which happen to have problematic licensing issues directly into their repos; instead the user would be forced to download e.g. all those goodies manually. The people who wrote and maintain "Automatix" then obviously thought: "Manually!? How unfriendly ... " and hence wrote their program, so you don't need to download those "problematic" apps yourself -- "Automatix" will do it for you. 
So obviously "Automatix" and the stuff it offers to install might be illegal in your area, especially in the US of A, whereas in most European countries you don't need to worry and can install away anything "Automatix" has to offer.
So obviously "Automatix" and the stuff it offers to install might be illegal in your area, especially in the US of A, whereas in most European countries you don't need to worry and can install away anything "Automatix" has to offer.