>On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 16:54, der.hans wrote:
>> Am 02. Feb, 2004 schwätzte Derek Neighbors so:
>>
>> > I can buy that to a degree. However, I would have a real problem if I
>> > went to go buy that 350Z I want from my local Nissan dealer. Then find
>> > out they tacked on $2800 for "service".
>>
>> Ah, but that is what happens. 'service' is called warranty. Is it legal
to
>> sell a new vehicle without a warranty? I'm certain the market wouldn't
bear
>> it, anyway.
>
>Even if we agreed to this, which I don't entirely. They still have you
>locked in. For example getting your new car serviced by certain people
>or having it modified later, "voids" the warranty.

Whoa - wrong.  Absolutely wrong.  To use your car analogy, if you replace
the brake system, they won't warrant the aftermarket brakes.  Nor will Ford
or GM.  If I replace sendmail with a home-grown version, RH won't support
it.  They will support every other component.  I don't think that is
unreasonable.

> If you change your
>own oil and 25,000 miles in the engine blows they can refuse to honor
>the warranty.

Sorry, wrong again.  My team and I support the RHEL servers at Bank of
America.  We apply the updates, we tune the servers, we change the
configurations.  We are not RH employees.  RH still warrants the OS.

> I don't like it anymore for cars than I do for operating
>systems. The difference is in operating systems I have a choice. :)

Yup.

>> > To me this is more a kin to what Red Hat is doing by attaching the
service
>> > fee to the license. If they want to sell the "authorized dealer" aspect
>> > great, it gives them a decided advantage. All the more reason, to
**not**
>> > lock me into them. If they really are superior what are they afraid of?
>> > Why must they attach the service to the sale of the product?
>>
>> Is RH really locking people into RH? Could I not purchase a copy of RHEL
and
>> then resell it multiple times?

No - RHEL is not released under the GPL.  Those components which are GPL
(the vast majority of the distro) are available as source.

>>True, RH doesn't have to allow much of the
>> software to be further released as not all licenses have the guarantees
of
>> the GPL but thus far I haven't heard of RH exploiting that.
>
>I haven't seen the licenses of everything they put in, so it is
>impossible for me to tell.

If you look at
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/redhat/redhat/linux/enterprise/3/en/os/i386/SRPMS
you will see that almost all the SRPMs are there.  There is apparently some
proprietary software included with RHEL (I think the clustering software).

>> I could see RH requiring me to change the name and remove RH logos.
>
>The problem is deeper than this.

Bleh.

Thomas