selling system with Fefora Linux 4228

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:20:13 -0700, Lucas Gump

What license fee? Fedora Core is free. What's more the GPL has no effect on any of your application software as long as you don't link in any GPLed code. Merely compiling and running it on Linux doesn't trigger the GPL, you have to use some GPL code in your application to trigger that.

If you want a Linux system that comes with support then you'll want to ship with Redhat Enterprise Linux or SUSE. Those do have license fees, you should contact Redhat or SUSE about OEMing those systems. There are free versions of RHEL, Whitebox, CentOS are free clones, Scientific Linux is basically a clone with a few extra apps thrown in. However if you are selling a commercial system you should make the decision whether you want to offer a system based on a free Linux or if you want to offer a system based on a supported Linux. If you want to use a supported version then ship RHEL or SUSE and pay the fees, using Whitebox or CentOS is rinky dink. If you want to ship it on a free Linux then use Fedora Core. However if you choose to ship a commercial application on Fedora Core you should make sure that it isn't distribution dependent. Test your application on both Fedora Core 2, Fedora Core 3, Fedora Core 4, Debian, SUSE and a couple of versions of Mandriva. If you can run on all of those then you'll have fewer support issues of your own because you'll have removed the distribution dependencies. A lot of commercial vendors pick a particular version of RedHat EL and say that's what they support and nothing else. That reduces their testing costs but it makes life harder for their clients who may prefer a different version of Linux.