Actually I agree with Paul that Redhat is charging too much for
their product. That is why there are clones of Redhat 
commercial product like CentOS or Scientific Linux by
rebuilding the RPMs from source. Redhat still sticks to
GPL so they have to distribute the source RPM. The problem
is that they dominate the Linux world by teaming with big
companies like Oracle and other ISVs. To me they are
almost the same as Microsoft. Anyway I am not against
Microsoft so why I am against Redhat? Maybe it is because
they just rip so many open source contributors out
there. Then IBM comes to my mind as well. They earn much
more money than they contribute to Linux. :(

For personal users, I think it is not a good idea to pay
for Redhat or Novel or others Linux vendors. Instead there
are Fedora and Debian for us personal users. The problem is
that even Debian is trying to push commercialization. To 
differentiate from each other, there bound to be incompatibilities
between different distributions. ISVs then have to stick to
Redhat/Suse/(Future Debian?). It is a good thing for the
business user but may not be such a good thing for personal
users. We all like more choices, right?

For business users, to pay for support is of course more 
convenient if cost is not a main concern. There are
different calculation of TCO though (total cost of ownership).

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: William "Chops" Westfield [mailto:westfw@mac.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2005 7:14 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] I say it is spinach . . .

On Aug 22, 2005, at 6:54 AM, Paul Hutchinson wrote:

> RedHat is no longer a free software vendor, they changed to an annual
> subscription based service over a year ago.

But they sell (for an annual subscription fee) software that is
"free" by virtue of open source, right?  Or have they managed to
circumvent the copyleft?  You're paying for convenience, bundling,
and support, as per RMS dogma, and Redhat is profitable following
that model, right?

BillW
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