Greg Wallace wrote:
Then again, I don't recall whether the downloads were actually a "legitimate" way of obtaining the product or not,
If downloading SUSE Linux was not legitimate, why would Novell be offering that possibility? AFAI have understood, Novell/SUSE/Redhat and other distro-vendors cannot charge anyone for the actual software (because it doesn't belong to them), and instead they are somehow obliged to make it freely available for download. I'm not sure exactly how this works though - I don't recall Novell making SLES available for download? SLES is effectively just another distro with a different support scheme/model.
though it would seem that Novell would not be in the business of giving away something they were simultaneously selling(?).
They're not. They're giving away the software/distro, but what they're selling is their value-add (manual, support, packaging etc.). /Per Jessen, Zürich