[WBEL-users] Redhat Legalese

[Hedemark, Magnus]

Joe Klemmer [mailto:klemmerj@webtrek.com] said:
[btw - I *am* subscribed to the mailing list, so there is no need to copy me
on replies]

> 	It's a good thing that RH does contribute so much other 
> stuff back to
> the same parties. 

Well, the level at which they contribute is up for debate I suppose.  I've
talked to people involved in the grub & kde projects, for example, that were
very cross with Red Hat for not feeding patches upstream (they had to be
fished out of distribution CD's).

Red Hat does get major bonus points for making their own projects (most of
them, anyway) released under GPL.

> The open source/free software world would be much
> poorer today without their great work.

Oh, absolutely.  Don't take my comment out of proportion.  They contribute
quite a bit to the community, but the vast majority of the code in any RHL
distribution was not written by Red Hat employees, so my point still stands.
It's not *wrong* for them to make money off of the hard work of others.  I'm
not suggesting that.  I was merely supporting the notion that the RHEL
license fee has very little to do with paying for software and everything to
do with paying for services rendered.