Is linux free 5034

Well, no. A counter-example would be Libranet. Back around Libranet 2.8, someone asked on the Libranet discussion forums if there was anything that would make it illegal to duplicate and redistribute that distribution, and one of the two guys (Jon and Tal Danzig) who produced the distribution said "No", despite the fact that there were no accessible online copies of 2.8 at that time.

Everyone so much loved and appreciated Libra Computer Systems (of Vancouver) and wanted that small firm to survive and thrive that nobody was posting ISOs: Instead, people were advising newcomers to pay Libra's very modest charges for either CDs or money-supported downloads -- in recognition that even offering public bandwidth costs money, and the Danzig's were not rich people.

Jon recently died of cancer, by the way. Libra's in the middle of "restructuring", and we hope they'll emerge intact -- but they have a anyway.

RHEL is a special case: All of the software on the RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 CDs is open-source, but the image files are trademark-encumbered and proprietary-licensed. Therefore, they are not lawfully redistributable for profit (though they would be for free). People who could host the ISOs for free public download generally decline to do so because they'd have to pay huge bandwidth bills for no benefit to themselves.

However, a number of projects rebuild the ISOs without the encumbered image files, and offer the exact same distribution under a different name. My favourite of those is CentOS, currently at release 4.1, which is exactly the same software as RHEL 4 with Update 1.

SUSE has numerous editions, some of which have restrictively licenced third-party software, and others of which don't. I already provided the URL of my page that details this. You seem to have have ignored that. Here's the URL again:

Mandrake isn't Mandrake any more: It renamed itself "Mandriva" when it acquired the Brazilian firm Conectiva. You can find the regular download edition via Distrowatch. It includes only freely redistributable software. Mandriva Club adds to that extra CDs that furnish non-redistributable, restrictively licensed software.

Yes, but, once again, you're better off with CentOS.

For one thing, then you have access to updates, which with RHEL are provided directly by that company only if you're the registered purchaser. It's possible to set up RHEL to use third-party update facilities, but not the default as it is with CentOS.

-- Cheers, Chip Salzenberg: "Usenet is not a right." Rick Moen Edward Vielmetti: "Usenet is a right, a left, a jab, The postman hits! You have new mail."