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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

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gigatexal·

But RHEL is not free. So... can’t this be included then only used after the user sets up a license?

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RHEL is free software. It's not free of charge though.

The difference is generally not understood on a lot people. Its freedom, not price.

It is an issue of English language that cannot cover it. Turkish, my mother tongue, has six counterparts for them: ücretsiz "unpaid", bedava "gratis", hür "unrestricted (person)", özgür "free (freedom)", serbest "unrestricted, accessible (thing)", beleş "price-free (as in, you ought not to expect much out of it)"

It's 100% free, you can use CentOS which is identical to RHEL and provided by Redhat.

While it's true CentOS is free and exactly the same (minus a few packages that needed to change RHEL to CentOS), RHEL is exclusively a licensed distribution and is a commercial product.

> RHEL is exclusively a licensed distribution

It's still GPL and you still get the full code, hence CentOS. The benefit to licensed RHEL is the support.

Free does not mean non-commercial in this case. Free software can be sold and it would remain free as long as all the source code is made available to the buyer and they are allowed to modify it to their needs.

RHEL source code is free. You pay for the RHEL value adds like a compiled version of RHEL and support. If you want a compiled version of RHEL for free, then go with CentOS.

RHEL is free (use CentOS or Fedora)

Support is not free. If you want software updates, security patches, bug fixes, or somebody to call when shit hits the fan you pay Red Hat.

If not CentOS/Fedora use the same source codes

Yeah free software but you need to purchase a support agreement is what I was getting at. In any case you could get around this by just running it in a container, no?

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