Is linux free 4982

In a message on 7 Oct 2005 10:54:00 -0700, wrote :

White Box Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org) has GPL versions of both RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0 available for download (CentOS) www.centos.org has a GPL version of RHEL 4.0 available for download.

These two web sites offer (legal) free downloads of what RedHat 'sells' (RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0). RedHat Enterprise Linux (the 'pay' version) just has a few added things. WBL and Centos are 'sanitized' versions of RHEL -- RedHat's trandmarks and a handful of RedHat specific 'extras' have been removed. Otherwise these distros are in fact exactly what you would pay for if you were to buy what RedHat 'sells'. What you would be paying for is *direct support services*. RedHat is not actually selling code itself. All of the *sources* for RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0 (both the base distros and all of the updates) are available for free download from RedHat's site. The only thing you have to 'pay' RedHat for is the binaries on CDs, but what you are really getting for your money is lots of hand holding (support). If you don't need this level of support, you can download all of the source RPMS and build your own system. The people at White Box Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org) and CentOS (www.centos.org) have downloaded these source RPMs and built a set of iso images. And they download and build the update RPMs (from RedHat).

All of the utilities and support code are available for *free* download (eg compilers, utilities, libraries, applications, etc.).

RedHat, Suse, and Mandrake don't sell the 'source code', only packaged binaries with support services. ALL of the source RPMs are available for download and I know of two groups that have created re-packaged and re-branded binary distributions from RedHat's source RPMs, that can be downloaded for free.