Re: Pirating Ubuntu?

["Jarod Wilson" <user=74@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 01:19 -0400, randy cole wrote: 
> Jarod Wilson wrote: 
> > 
> > 
> > No such issues until Red Hat Enterprise Linux was born. Redistributing 
> > rips of your true blue (red?) RHEL isos would violate your support 
> > contract agreement, or something like that, from what I remember. Part 
> > of me wishes RHEL were freely distributable, making CentOS unnecessary, 
> > but there's those pesky shareholders to think about... 
> > 
> > Okay, Red Hat employee mode off, pure speculation from someone who has 
> > no actual knowledge about who decided what and/or why about the thought 
> > of distributing RHEL freely or not: 
> > 
> > Consider for example, $bigcustomer thinks they have enough in-house 
> > expertise, so they don't buy support contracts for their RHEL-based 
> > Oracle cluster, but still gets to run on an OS certified by Oracle to 
> > run their DB. Oracle gets paid, RH doesn't. (Oh wait, Oracle has their 
> > RHEL respin too... How's that working out, Larry?...) But anyway, one 
> > might deduce that RH feels they'd lose out on a lot of support contracts 
> > if RHEL were distributed freely. I think it'd do a lot of good for Red 
> > Hat's rep if RHEL were distributed freely, but who knows if that would 
> > compensate for bottom line losses. 
> >   
> I was working at a company last year where consultants were setting up 
> an expensive Oracle ERP system, complete with Red Hat Linux.  I  noticed 
> the icon on the manager's desktop had a big "O" icon to connect to the 
> server.  Yet everyone thought they were using Red Hat Linux and nobody 
> was troubled when I pointed out that it was Oracle's respin.  They kind 
> of liked that they only had to work with one vendor.  Except that they 
> were actually working with a consulting firm and assumed that they would 
> be fine after the consultants left.