The Rails Wheels licencing system and Open Source

[Michael Tiemann]

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, is quoted as saying:

*I recognize Red Hat's a prominent alternative to incumbent players, but Red
Hat's been around for awhile now, and it's not easy to get off Red Hat. It
might be easier to get off RHEL than say, AIX from IBM, but...*
Whitehurst: It's very simple. You can stop paying us.

Would that qualify in your mind as a form of optionality of support
contracts?  Full reference:
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Interview-Red-Hat-s-new-CEO/0,339028227,339290968,00.htm

CentOS and Oracle both build distributions based on Red Hat sources.  CentOS
is very explicit that they do not provide support, and they recommend that
people needing support use Red Hat.  Oracle builds their distribution based
on CentOS and do offer commercial support, proving that one can have
supported sources and binaries (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), sources and
unsupported binaries (CentOS), and supported sources and binaries again from
unsupported sources (Oracle).  Surely you would class Red Hat's software as
commerical, no?

M

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 4:29 AM, Mark James <mrj at advancedcontrols.com.au>wrote:

> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>
>> Mark James wrote:
>>
>>> Matthew Flaschen wrote:
>>>
>>>  There is plenty of Open Source commercial software,  ...
>>>>
>>> Matthew, could you provide some examples.
>>>
>>
>> 1. Linux
>> 2. Solaris
>> 3. GNU
>> 4. Java
>> 5. Eclipse
>>
>
> Thanks Matthew.
>
> How often is a simple distribution fee charged, and how
> often is the commercial aspect in the form of an optional
> or compulsory support contract?
>
> I wouldn't class software that's associated with optional
> support contracts as commercial software.
>
> Mark
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20080903/55e1ac92/attachment.html>