Is linux free 4981

It is not necessarily free as in gratis. Read

In particular:

"The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software"

Other licenses differ, but the basis is the same: you can take source code and modify it if necessary. Whether something must be offered for no cost is not addressed (though see the below URL for one location where it is addressed, sorta).

To pick one of your examples, RH complies with the GPL by providing the source RPMs for its enterprise distro. You can download these sources yourself, build them, and mostly recreate RHEL. What you can't recreate is the proprietary software that RH writes itself, and can thus restrict in any way they want. Whether this is wise or not is a different question, but whether they can do so is not in question.

But, since you asked, there are plenty of cheaper distros. Slackware sells for about US$40. CentOS, which as somebody mentioned is basically RHEL stripped of proprietary marks-software, is US$10-15 from a few different vendors. There are plenty of others if you actually take the time to look.

Quite frankly, you deserved your shredding. I hope you'll learn from it rather than grow bitter and grumpy like the rest of us. :)

--keith

-- (try just my userid to email me)