selling system with Fefora Linux 4230

General Schvantzkoph

I work for a company that ships bundled systems. We got burned with RH7.3 because of the HW support issues. Fedora has the exact same issues. We switched to RHEL3 but then ran into some other licensing problems. Basically, unless you're willing to sign up for hundreds of licenses Red Hat is not interested in you. If you license the systems yourself you can't transfer the license to your customer.

After talking to our legal department we finally decided to to remove the offending RH rpms from the system we ship, send out all the required licensing and disclaimers. with the systems. We have the RH source CD's ready for anyone who asks for them.

And we don't pay the for support since we support the systems ourselves. We use RHEL3 because we did licensing one in-house system. If RH decides to give us trouble we have a larger legal department :-) I suggested CentOS because is appears to be a cleaner version and RH is less likely to hbuttle people who use it.

Anyone who sells commercial systems (HW + SW) will tell you that the customers could care less about the OS or anything else that's in the system. Most don't even know what an OS is.

dan