> From: Ryan Ware <whiterabbit1 at gmail.com> > On 4/22/05, dfellman at mn.rr.com <dfellman at mn.rr.com> wrote: > > Essentially, RedHat...only free. As in free beer. > > -dwight > ... so if they can't make money developing the OS, or > supporting it ... One begins to see why a lot of ISV's are > not beating the door down to make a Linux version. Ah, but there's the rub. They *do* make money. Sometimes I'm amazed that ANYONE tries to release a distribution and sell support. Red Hat (as a company) is just awesome in my book. Red Hat also knows that unless potential customers can try their software easily, they will not try it. Dwight might well one day recommend that a company buy RHEL and its spiffy support contract because he knows the product. My company pays for a RHEL contract, and I run CentOS at home so I stay on top of things. It's great to have free software, but nobody expects free support. Maybe I'm not clear about what you don't get. If it's why developers give their code away, people have talked that to death. If it's why companies try to get into business selling support, well that's because it's a business and there is money to be made. The "everything for nothing" culture doesn't sustain itself. It's a drain on FOSS culture just as it is on the "real" culture in which they live. Developers and the GPL create an upward spiral of fantastic, forcibly unproprietary software. That is the engine. Chris