Free vs. pay versions

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu-Z8efaSeK1ezqlBn2x/YWAg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> From: Rich Braun [mailto:richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org]
>>
>> So I will pose this question: ?does anyone here use SLES? ?What makes
>> you opt
>> to pay for it rather than use the open version?
>
> Not directly related to your question, but similar ...
>
> I have applications to support which only run on RHEL. ?So we run them on
> Centos and RHEL. ?Works fine. ?The decision for us to buy RHEL versus run
> Centos is based on hardware.
>
> Redhat releases most, but not all, of the packages they use to build RHEL to
> the public.

No, everything used to build RHEL is released to the public. And its
"Red Hat", not Redhat or RedHat. :)

> There's a small amount of proprietary. ?One of the proprietary
> things is necessary for Dell OMSA to be able to configure the RAID card
> while the OS is running. ?The Centos free alternative isn't sufficient ...
> Same is true to apply Dell firmware updates, and some other things.

There's a RHEL supplemental repo/disc that contains some binary-only
vendor-provided bits. Red Hat doesn't use these to "build RHEL"
though. Nor does Red Hat have the source or the rights to redistribute
it if they did, otherwise, it would be part of the distribution itself
with sources provided. This sounds like something from the
supplemental repo.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org