Re: Plea for a reasonable RHASv3 license option

["Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa redhat com>]

On Sat, 2003-08-30 at 22:45, shane stixrud org wrote:

> It is my understanding that 
> you can install it on as many servers as you like and run it for as long 
> as you like.  What you can't do is call up redhat and ask for support or 
> sign up for a RHN account.

Legally, this is not accurate. Quoting from section 4 of the RHEL 2.1 US
License:
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_2-1.html?country=United+States&;

"If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then
Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each
additional Installed System."

English Summary: You need to pay for a RHEL Subscription for every
installed instance of RHEL 2.1.

And to pre-empt the flamewars, no, this is not a violation of the GPL.
The source is still yours to do whatever you want with.

To get back onto $TOPIC, I (not speaking for Red Hat), think having an
additional RHEL option with RHN+product (no support) is a reasonable
idea. However, I don't think 20 people "me too"ing on a mailing list is
going to elicit that sort of change. I would suggest doing the
following:

Fill out a product suggestion form on the redhat.com website:
http://www.redhat.com/apps/response/product_contact.html

Make sure you mention explicitly what you want, RHEL+maintenance,
without support at a slightly lower price (not free, we do have to eat).
It also carries more weight if you can say something like "I would
purchase XXX copies of this if it were available".

I know that web petitions seem somewhat trite, but if Red Hat Sales sees
a petition with a significant amount of names on it, of
people/companies/businesses/etc who would be RHEL customers that are not
today, they start to see missed revenue. Someone might want to start
such a petition. I'd be happy to hand it over to the powers-that-be if
it had a lot of names and companies/businesses on it.

Red Hat, like any business, acts on revenue. Show Red Hat that it is
missing tangible revenue, and it will respond.

~spot