On Sunday, April 02, 2006 @ 3:50 PM, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 10:41 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
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.
Not at all. The GPL explicitly allows anyone to charge for it. Please read the GPL FAQ at www.fsf.org
I'm not sure exactly how this works though - I don't recall Novell making SLES available for download?
Well, we do. It's available from the web site, you get a 30 day evaluation period.
They're not. They're giving away the software/distro, but what they're selling is their value-add (manual, support, packaging etc.).
Exactly. And the main focus is support
Though the packaging is also valuable, right? SuSE, Red Hat, etc. tie everything together in their distro. There's value in that above and beyond the value of the individual open source components therein, right? Greg Wallace