First of all, Mandrake is NOT built on RedHat. Why do people have that impression? Besides, Mandrake owns the desktop
Second, neither Mandrake or RedHat are proprietary in the strict sense. The GPL is very simple: if you use GPL source code in your program then that means that YOU HAVE TO DISTRIBUTE THE SOURCE CODE FOR YOUR PROGRAM FREELY. Both Mandrake and RedHat, and all Linux distros do that.
Third, giving away the source code freely, without questions, and allowing it to be incorporated in other programs without restrictions is not just open source, it is releasing your source code as PUBLIC DOMAIN. Linux doesn't do this, KDE, Gnome, X-Free, etc, don't do this. They all use GPL, therefore you cannot use them in a closed-source program.
What you are asking is too much. You are asking for Matt, who has put countless hours on Monkey's Audio (which is by far the most efficient lossless audio codec, and one of the most "compressing") to mark his source code as public domain and let anyone use it without recognition, for the least? How could he even know if a certain program was using his code? I think he does a lot by granting free access to it, via a simple request.
And what do you mean discotheques can't use it? They just have to use one of the programs that supports APE, the APE tools themselves or, in the unlikely event they have their own software, ask Matt for permission...
On the subject of FLAC support, well, I think JRiver should not spend much time on it if there's not a considerable base of requests. Otherwise, just follow the open-source motto: "here, have this, code it yourself".
Just one more thing, I've been using APE's for a long time and I want to thank you, Matt, for coding this great format. It's helped me a lot. If I knew any Linux programming you could rest assured that by now I'd have done an XMMS plugin
Maybe I'll get a nice book for the Christmas holidays and get to work