[Asterisk-Users] Re: Advice on OS Choice

[Joe Greco]

> On 14-Oct-2004, Stephen R. Besch wrote:
> > My understanding is that if you don't ask for or need support, RedHat
> > (and the other distro's as well) can be downloaded and installed for free.
> > Am I wrong about this? Isn't that the whole point of the GPL on linux?
> 
> No, it is a violation of the EULA on RedHat's server products to run them
> without having purchased a support agreement.  It is not permitted to obtain
> or run RedHat Enterprise Linux without having paid for it.
> 
> I'm not sure how they get away with this practice on GPL'd code, but they
> do.

Selling a product isn't disallowed under either GPL or BSD style licenses.
The really big difference is that you can't take GPL'd code, change it, and
sell or distribute it without distributing your changes (an
oversimplification, but anyways...) whereas with a true free software
license, you don't have any serious restrictions on what you can do with
it - you can bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate it, you can choose to
distribute your works for free, for money, with or without source code,
etc.  The GPL strips some of these freedoms by forcing the distribution of
source code.  It does not, however, prevent the code from being sold.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.