[Fsf-friends] Re: FREE SOFTWARE THAT IS GOOD ...

[Harish Narayanan]

Mahesh T. Pai wrote:

>The  largest  and oldest  hardware-cum-software  vendor  in the  world
>supports GNU/Linux  on their  PCs. May  be you did  not ask  the right
>question? 
>  
>
Who is this, HP? (Because if it was them, I remember seeing no such 
option on their websites 2 years ago.) What prominent laptop 
manufacturer had a fully supported GNU/Linux line a couple of years ago? 
Maybe I didn't look hard enough when I bought it, but they sure weren't 
easy to find.

>Not very sure  of that.  Maybe, going by hearsay,  this holds good for
>the free-as-in-beer version  of RH which we used  to get till sometime
>back. Cannot  say the same for the  paid version. I have  not used the
>paid version,  so dunno.  Hope somebody will  clarify on  whether paid
>isos from RH contain non-free binaries.
>  
>
This is true for all their software. These are the guys that shipped 
with an ultra broken GNOME (0.1x or something) fueling it's development 
while others happily shipped a non-free functional QT based KDE. The 
"free as in beer" version was (and is) fully free software. (They are 
not Suse or something). If you want, you can download the sources  [ 
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/ ] for their 
enterprise line (RHEL or whatever) and compile it yourself. Everything 
is open, including the installer. All you can't do is go about selling 
it under the name of RedHat, which is their trademark. Fair enough I'd 
say. If you're interested, as I was searching for the download link, I 
found their business model [ 
http://www.redhat.com/about/mission/business_model.html ].

I somehow respect them even more now.

>Tha apart, a major component of the RPM system is considered non-free
>by Debian since its license imposes burdens on users.
>  
>
What portion is this? As far as I can see, it seems to be GPL [ 
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-resources-license.html ]

Harish