On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 17:23 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 14:33, Craig White wrote: > > > > > > I still think what they're doing is wrong and I won't use it or > > > recommend it. Obviously a fair lot of you think it's just peachy to > > > get RHEL for free. Cool, knock yourselves out. > > ---- > > there are some things that you aren't considering... > > > > 1 - Red Hat isn't required to put all their SRPM's on the net - free for > > download, they only need to provide the SRPM's to purchasers and that > > could be via other methods...it's simply the method that they are > > choosing. > > The Centos team claims to have one or more paid licenses for > the matching RHEL products and at least the GPL'd packages > cannot have restrictions against additional redistribution. > > Any way you look at it, one layer of redistribution isn't > any more or less moral than any other layer. The GPL takes > away the ability for some other company to make a better > commercial package and charge the incremental amount for > the improvement, but to avoid that competition you have to > expect that others will copy and possibly improve the > product and give it away. ---- that pretty much summarizes the beauty of GPL in the view of the end user and why commercial interests have to figure out how to derive income as they impart value into the software that in actuality, they don't own and cannot restrict redistribution as they are actually required to make any and all modifications available in source form. Craig
