Hi,
I just tried slogging through the marketing info on the Redhat and Suse sites. Basically, I’m trying to find out if you can use those distros at a business without paying for them. It does not look possible to download a “Red Hat” distro though and you would have to go with Fedora if you did not want to pay. My research hasn’t progressed as far on the Suse side but I suspect Novell has the same model.

Could someone comment on using RedHat and Suse in a business from a license cost perspective? Can Red Hat and Suse Professional be downloaded and installed for free or do you HAVE TO buy the support if you want to use one of those distros in a business setting?

(I realize we are not lawyers here and I’m not looking for a true legal opinion, just something to get me started.)

Thanks for any insights.

Well, that pretty much is the reason Linux is used on at least one machine in 70% of all companies. You do not have to purchase anything. The pay versions offer support, but really anything else in a pay for distro can be done or configured using the free version.

There are plenty of companies using free versions of redhat (particularly 7.3)

Sure they can be used in businesses.

If you don't feel you need the enterprise editions don't buy them. We run a server here at work that runs on SuSE Professional. We don't need the support and it's only one server. We paid $90 for the retail Professional box and we're happy

The enterprise edition's basically get you updates for a longer period of time and support. For $900 more I didn't think that SuSE support was worth it. I'm fine with looking stuff up online

yes, what you can do is find forks, or others who are distributing the ISOs for those distros.

perfect example is whitebox, this is redhat enterprise for FREE.

http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

check it out. as for suse as far as i know you can get the suse 9 for free, but not their suse9 pro or any of the pro veriants for free as novel still keeps a portion of the pro distro for some reason out of the GNU project. i do not know all of the details on suse, but i know you can get the RHE for free.

CentOS is another version of RHEL.

thanks man, i'll check it out