On Tue, 11 Jun 2013, "Pidgorny, Slav (GEUS)" <slav.pidgorny@anz.com> wrote:
Red Hat sells support, not license to run their binaries.
You really should talk to some people who are involved in Red Hat "support" contracts. If it was really just "support" then you would be able to get Red Hat "support" on a single system (and maybe one of the cheaper licenses) and reproduce all bugs/problems on that one system. Among other things you ideally don't want to be trying out bug fixes on production systems anyway so reproducing bugs on a test system that is allowed to have down-time and which has no secret data is a good practice. But companies which pay for Red Hat "support" end up paying for all systems they run even though they usually don't have Red Hat people doing anything to the majority of systems. Every company which has multiple RHEL systems with paid licenses is proof that they aren't just paying for "support".
The GPL restrictions you're talking about don't seem to be that significant - companies use Linux for anything you can imagine.
But they can't ship binaries without shipping the source.
Linux is as capitalist as it gets. On par with BSD and Windows.
Repeating your mantra isn't going to convince any of us who have experience with using and developing Linux. I've had over 20 years experience of using and developing Linux and the difference between Linux and Windows in terms of all aspects of commercialisation is very clear. BSD is different. The source is available but anyone who modifies it is free to distribute binaries without the source. This makes certain forms of commercialisation easier but is still very different from Windows. As you continue this discussion please keep in mind the fact that EVERYONE here knows more about Linux than you do. Feel free to ask questions so you can learn. But don't think you'll be teaching us anything about Linux. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/