A guy at work sent this.

[D. Hageman]

It isn't even that.  RedHat and Novell sell:

1) Pre-compiled software with bugfixes and feature enhancements.
2) Support for issues you might encounter while using their software.

It is like having the choice to get a car for free, but the problem is 
that it is unassembled.  You can assemble it yourself, but you realize 
that you aren't that good of a mechanic and your wife will make fun of you 
for the rest of your life if you get it wrong.  So instead you go to 
Company X that will sell you already assembled cars that have been tested 
and guaranteed to work.  Company X also provides support if and when the 
car starts to not working correctly.  Company X makes no claims that their 
cars aren't the same ones you can get for free unassembled, but they might 
mention they hung a pine air freshner from the mirror.

The difference with some of these companies on e-bay is that they are 
re-branding and selling it as if it was their own product without providing 
the source or giving recognition to the people that really deserve it.


On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Jason Clinton wrote:

> On Wednesday 17 August 2005 14:26, David Nicol wrote:
>> you mean, like Red Hat and Novell do?
>
> RedHat and Novell don't sell rebranded OSS apps for the Windows platform. The
> end-user software market for Windows is different from Linux in that there
> are plenty of suckers out there willing to shell out some $$ for
> pieces-of-software-at-a-time.
>
> In the highly speculative scenario I proposed, one would be getting insane
> amounts of markup off each individual package -- selling them all separately
> in the same way that proprietary apps for Windows are sold. I'm sure there
> are plenty of people out there who would never know they could have gotten it
> for free.
>
> However, the ethical measure of such an enterprise is less certain...
>
>

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||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
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