Revisiting an old topic: licensing/titlement and "redistribution"

[Ray Van Dolson]

Hi everyone, this topic has been brought up from time to time, but
generally I've seen conflicting answers (and have just received one
from my RH sales rep).

To avoid getting too overcomplicated by describing my specific
situation, I'm trying to determine if a copy of RHEL was purchased
(entitlement and support for one year say), are we then allowed to take
the installation media and reinstall it to X number of machines and
just _not_ take advantage of support or updates for those machines?

This was my initial understanding of things, but reading over the
Enterprise Agreement and EULA it seems that this may not be the case.

However I am confused because I understand that you can get a 30-day
trial of RHEL and continue using it legally even after the trial is
completed.  I'm not sure what the "real" difference is between simply
reinstalling from media to many machines and downloading 50 trial
copies and doing the same.

In addition, you can continue to use a paid-for installation of RHEL
after the entitlement has run out.

My ultimate goal here is not to fleece RH out of any $$ they are owed,
but to get a handle on what we should and should not be paying for, and
perhaps get a tighter rein on what is and isn't installed around here.
:)

The vast majority of our RHEL installs are point-release specific -- ie
RHEL4 U4, and are not really production machines but just done to
reproduce a problem or verify compatibility.  It would be nice in these
situations to just slap a copy of RHEL on a machine for a few weeks and
not need to worry about tracking down whether or not we have a valid
entitlement, etc, etc, or even worse trying to reconcile it all at the
end of the year when subscriptions expire :)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
Ray