Is Fedora *really* Free?

[Thufir]

On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 12:34:13 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:

> On 10/15/06, Keith G. Robertson-Turner
> <fedora-gmane.00003 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk> wrote:
> [ snip ]
> 
> The article you linked to is FUD which has already been disputed
> publically on via the Fedora Annoucement list.
> 
>> The implication (from the article) is that unless the Fedora project
>> can start providing metrics to Red Hat, then the project is in danger
>> of losing funding, and hence be discontinued.
> 
> 
> Despite the fact that the article was mostly flaimbait, are you're
> saying that this not make sense? Fedora is Free to us the users, not
> to Redhat. They need to spend their money wisely, else they can't pay
> for all the servers, developers, and bandwidth Fedora consumes.
> Regardless of how much community involvement there is, Fedora uses a
> great deal of resources, the bill for which RedHat has been footing
> all these years. I think it is perfectly reasonable that they have
> some metric by which to measure usage of Fedora. What's the point of
> funding Fedora if only 50 people use it? A project of this size cannot
> be free to everyone, it may be free to us the users and volunteer
> helpers (poackages, devs, etc) but I'm pretty sure the accountants
> over at RedHat can testify that it isn't free to RedHat.
> 
> -- 
> Fedora Core 5 and proud

The mandate, IIRC, is for Fedora to be a testing bed for RHEL.  That is,
we're all pawns in RH's evil experiment to get people to test their
software for free.  The bastards!  And, don't forget the free advertising
every time "redhat" appears in print.  Some damn marketer probably gets a
penny from redhat every time the word redhat gets typed, even in an e-mail
list.

Just as there's whitebox for RHEL, there's nothing wrong with a whitebox
for Fedora.



-Thufir