On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 01:51:54PM -0500, Post, Mark K wrote: > Hence what we're seeing now with SUSE and Red Hat not selling their products > unless a maintenance and/or support contract is purchased.
However, they cannot prohibit someone who receives a copy of their systems from distributing it, so long as it's all GPLed (which Red Hat is, although SuSE is not (IIRC, their installer is not)). The GPL advocates all claim that they're not out to put programmers out of work. They hold up the services model as a politically correct way of making money in their utopia. The only problem is that damned few folks have been able to make that work, and not even all Linux distribution vendors have done so. Novell didn't go out and buy SuSE because it's a cash cow.
