Red Hat users balk at Enterprise Linux licensing

Red Hat users balk at Enterprise Linux licensing:

While Red Hat says the GPL gives customers the right to copy Red Hat Enterprise Linux freely, it also says it considers unauthorised copying to be a violation of its service contract – something that could lead to a breach of contract lawsuit, according to Bryan Sims, Red Hat’s vice president and associate legal counsel.

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It will take more than that to win over customers like Argonne National Labs’ Beckman, however. He would like to see Red Hat produce a plain English document that explains what users can and cannot copy under the Enterprise Linux support licence, and he would like to see a price structure that better accommodates the needs of his class of user.

“I don’t know of any site that has lots of processors that plans on buying a per-processor licence,” he said.

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