John writes:
> The most interesting part of this, in my estimation, is the price tag.
> $50,000 for open-source software!

RedHat is one of the masters of charging money for free software at the
moment.

I suspect that the $50K (or whatever) price is almost certainly a bundle of
(free) software along with installation and support services.

> Does the open-source license allow Red Hat to maintain exclusive
> rights to this port?

Nope.

But there is nothing in the GPL that prevents RedHat from only giving (or
selling) the code to people that they feel like, and nothing preventing them
from charging you $50K or whatever they feel like for it.

Once they give/sell you the object code, they are required to make the
source code (for GPLed components) available for a reasonable handling cost
(if they tried to charge you another $50,000 for the "handling" required to
get you the source then they would likely be in trouble with GNU/FSF and the
rest of the Open Source community at that point).

Also once you have the code, there's nothing stopping you from giving away
copies of all the GPLed and other "freely" licensed code to all your friends
(in fact GNU/FSF would probably encourage you to do so).

RedHat can prevent you from using the "RedHat Linux" trademark when you give
it away (or even sell it), but they can't prevent you from giving it away or
selling it.  RedHat's license agreement says in part:

THE "RED HAT" TRADEMARK AND RED HAT'S SHADOW MAN LOGO ARE REGISTERED
TRADEMARKS OF RED HAT, INC. IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER COUNTRIES. WHILE
THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT ALLOWS YOU TO COPY, MODIFY AND DISTRIBUTE THE
SOFTWARE, IT DOES NOT PERMIT YOU TO DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE UTILIZING RED
HAT'S TRADEMARKS. YOU SHOULD READ THE INFORMATION FOUND AT
http://www.redhat.com/about/trademark_guidelines.html BEFORE DISTRIBUTING A
COPY OF THE SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER IT HAS BEEN MODIFIED.

Of course if you get it for free from somewhere then you're not going to get
the other services that RedHat is bundling into their very impressive price.

There are other Linux/360 distributions that you can download for free.

I think IBM also plays some of these $50,000 for Linux games themselves,
IIRC.

I suspect that the sort of people who have zSeries boxes to run Linux on
aren't generally the sort of people who whine loudly about how everything in
their life should be free :-)

G.

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *