[ale] Enterprise Linux's

[Bob Toxen]

One of my clients who does pay for RHEL support tried the support.  He
got a woman in Singapore whose English was too poor for him to understand
her.  So much for support or "buying American".

An alternative to paying for support for all of your RHEL systems is to
pay for one and then scp the RPMs.  The GPL prohibits an organization from
placing restrictions on any GPL'ed code it distributes.  Commingling, e.g.,
Red Hat's BS "you can't copy 'cause of our trademarked images" makes the
entire thing GPL'ed as per the GPL.  Don't believe me, seek competent
legal advice.

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 09:47:09AM -0400, Brian Akins wrote:
> I want to see if I'm interpreting something correctly.  Various vendors 
> offer "Enterprise Linux's" (RedHat AS, SLES9, etc.)  They charge 
> $250-2500 for a "license,"  but 99% of it is GPL'ed.  From some digging 
> on their websites, they seem to acknowledge that you can use the 
> software without paying anything, unless you want support.  In some 
> spots they try to steer you towards the SRPMS and I know CentOS, for 
> example, is built from these.

> So, if I download RHEL, for example, iso's and will never use support, 
> it's "free," right?  I know I can download and compile all the SRPMS.

> This was asked by someone else, and I was hoping to get a more succinct 
> answer to them.

> -- 
> Brian Akins
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