Good Afternoon ppl.

im a student doing a project and would like to implement linux as a solution.

however i am lacking information on Linux licensing fees.

Can someone give a place to start?

ie. a webpage from Redhat or Mandrake that has the licensing fees for corporations...

how much each machine must pay to have Linux on the machine, etc.

i would like to compare it to Microsoft Windows...

thanks.

You need to read the GPL License.. which about every Linux distro uses.

Basically you can buy one Redhat box and install it on a thousand machines, and it would cost you nothing more than the original cost. Or you can actually download it for free and install it on those same thousand machines and it would be totally free.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html : GPL License

And you can probably go to redhat's site or mandrakes site to read about any other specifics they have for their particular distro's..

most of the distributions offer some groupware solutions but they are easy to find
www.suse.com
www.redhat.com
www.linux-mandrake.com
there are a lot
cheers, jens

thx guys for replying.

so it is "ok" for Corporations to just buy 1 copy of say...
Redhat and install it on all their machines without paying any
licensing fee?

hmm...

Yep totally fine...

Like tricky said read the GPL license...

Cheers

#Garry

They could also download it and install it on a million machines if they wanted, without payin anyone a dime.. but most corporations like the thought of having support, so lets say if corporation XYZ wanted a thousand desktops installed with Redhat, they probably would buy not a thousand copies of redhat but yet they could probably go to Redhat and say we want your support for these desktops and pay them that way for each computer Redhat will help them support.. when your buying the box versions of most distro's.. your not buying Linux, your buying the cd's it comes on, the pretty box, the manuals, any proprietary software they may include that isn't lincensed under the GPL, and most likely used by most, technical support.

Hope that helps in anyway. But the best clarification would be to read the License agreements that come with a distro and also most importantly the GPL.