On 03/02/15 17:12, Yasha Karant wrote:
> To be clear, the legal language may be "license for fee", "subscription
> for fee", or "stand on your head for fee".   The operative language is
> "FEE".  The RHEL 7 binary executable and the RPM updates are not
> available from Red Hat (not CentOS, SL, etc.) except to those who pay a
> fee, irrespective of whether or not one wants any "support".

This is an odd way to twist things.  You may register FOR FREE at
<https://access.redhat.com/> and get the possibility to download install
images which gives your 30 days access - FOR FREE.  But, yes, you are
right, to get the recent updates after those 30 days, you have to pay a fee.

And just to have that said: There are nothing in any GPL or F/OSS
licenses that requires binaries to be made available without any costs.
 What might be required (such as GPL licensed software) is access to the
source code.

And, just to mention it, support is optional, as there is a self-support
alternative these days.

<https://access.redhat.com/support/offerings/production/sla>

> The above are not to be regarded as negative or positive comments about
> the business practices of Red Hat that is a for-profit corporation and
> thus needs profit and cash flow models and mechanisms.

Yes, Red Hat is a for-profit company.  But lets not forget that they are
also providing the paychecks to several thousand employees all over the
globe, giving them a possibility to contribute back to the community
through Fedora, RHEL and a lot of different upstream projects.  In
addition they provide access to the source RPMs for all of the software
they release, which enables projects like SL.


David S.