Is linux free 5032

(Same old broken record.)

Something that might not have occurred to you: If so, so what? RH's service agreement is, in fact, not obligatory -- if you can find someone willing to make a CD-set copy for you free of charge (which act is entirely lawful):

Although RHEL is very much not my preference in distributions, I happen to have media for RHEL 3 and 4 on various supported architectures. If you happened to be in my area and I happened to like you, I might well be willing to make duplicates for you, as a favour. And no, I have no special desire to post ISOs on my ftp-Web server for the public, because I pay for my bandwidth and, although the machine and the line have survived repeated slashdotting, I'd rather that not happen avoidably. I suspect that untold others have come to the same buttessment.

Dislike the fact that nobody in your neighbourhood feels like doing that for you? Sucks to be you, I guess -- but it leaves an utter mystery how you or anyone else has been wronged in this picture (unless of course one grants your rubbish about everything provided on Linux distribution media automatically therefore being "derivative works" of the Linux kernel, which I certainly do not).

Meanwhile, 100% of the software contents of those disks is open source and fully available from Red Hat, Inc. in SRPM form at its expense, just as the two proprietary packages are available in SRPM form at its expense. And yet you call them "bad" because they don't do even more at their expense, and because they bundle a service contract with instances of their distribution that they hawk to the corporate world.

Sorry, I'm no huge fan of RH, Inc., but that's pretty ridiculous.