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

[Jon Stanley]

On Dec 20, 2007 12:03 PM, David Tonhofer <redhatter at m-plify.net> wrote:

> .........but can I run no-longer-subscribed Red Hat Enterprise
> instantiations or not?

I am not a lawyer, however I believe that you can - per direction from
RH legal at the Summit - but IF AND ONLY IF you have *no* currently
subscribed systems.  That is the barrier to not being bound to the
subscription agreement, which states 1 machine takes 1 entitlement.
The agreement applies to an entity, not an installation - therefore if
you have even a single subscription, all installations in your
organization require a subscription.

The reason the people mention that you can keep using the 30-day eval,
I think, is that they assume that you have no other relationship with
RH, and have entered into no other  agreements with them other than
the subscription agreement for the eval, which expires when you no
longer have a subscription (i.e. 30 days).  After that 30 days has
elapsed, I'm under the impression that you could install 5 billion
copies if that's what you'd like to do, since you are no longer bound
by the subscription agreement.

However, you cannot redistribute the software, because RH has given
you no trademark license, nor does any constituent license.

I hope that made things as clear as mud :).  FWIW, for testing and
non-production servers that you don't plan to buy a subscription for,
I would just use CentOS from the beginning and avoid this entire
discussion.