Karen Hill said: > A box license from MS is a one time purchase for a reasonable price, > redhat you must pay every year. MS gives you security updates via > windows update for free. Not so with Linux in terms of redhat. Like I > said before what good is freedom if I can't afford it?
A box license from Red Hat gives you a copy of all source code used to create the operating system and the relevant applications. If you want to, you can stop paying Red Hat and continue using/maintaining the system from this source code yourself. That's bad, as it takes your time from doing other, more productive, things. You're not paying Red Hat for the actual software. You're paying Red Hat for the services. You're paying Red Hat for things like speedy bugfix and security updates. You're paying Red Hat for things like the physical cost of producing the disc(s) that the system uses. You're paying Red Hat so that, if something goes wrong, you or your company and go to Red Hat and say, "Here. Fix this. It's not working." When you do this, they have to fix it. Why? Because, since you have the entire source code, if they don't fix it you could go to another vendor. Thus, Red Hat must continue to ship high-quality products in order to stay in business. Besides, there are other people, such as those of the CentOS project, who take Red Hat's source RPMs and build them into a completely free (as in "no cost" and freedom) system, with the same updates and errata for many years as Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution. (In fact, the current CentOS and the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux are almost(?) always binary-compatible with each other.) Aside from that, there are literally hundreds of other GNU/Linux distributions to choose from. If you want a totally no-cost system, you could try something else, such as Fedora Core (Red Hat's community-supported, "unofficial" GNU/Linux distro), Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, etc. --Peter (On a side note: This is the first of about 30 emails on this list that I've received that hasn't been spam... Who's in charge of the mail gateway, and would you *please* install at least a very basic spam filter? ^_^) _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
