[CLUE-Tech] GPL loopholes

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 14:59, Kirk Rafferty wrote:

*snip*

> A friend of mine works at a big company (healthcare, very profitable
> company) who shall go nameless.  They run about 15 RH boxes in production.
> Anyone that's worked with Red Hat Network knows that your first machine
> per account is free.  Additional support contracts are $60/machine/year.
> To avoid paying the support contract, they have 15 different Red
> Hat Network accounts.  This is pathetic, and does more to harm
> free/open-source software than it helps.

Holy crap... that's ridiculous! I can see not wanting to sign up for Red
Hat's Advanced Server support... but avoiding less than $1,000 a year
for 15 machines? Geez... they probably spend more than that on coffee. 

> I see a lot of people complaining about companies violating the GPL (most
> of which turn out to be untrue).  I wish more people would complain about
> the end-users.  If you're a student, I can see going free-as-in-beer.

No doubt ... I wish Linux had been at the current state of development
when I was in college! Even then, I would have been happy to spring for
the $30 Slackware set... 

> But if you've got a paying job, or if you're making money off free
> software, you need to be kicking a little back in.  The revolution doesn't
> run by the grace of St. IGNUcious alone, it needs a little bread too. :)

If for no other reason, kick in a few bucks out of self-interest to keep
things moving along... 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net