[rhn-users] using rhel legally

[Hiren Patel]

thank you for posting your views about this, it does help.
i have tried convincing my place of work to use centos for exactly the
reason that some of the machines used are not considered important
enough to buy redhat subscriptions for.
thanks again.

On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 07:21 +0100, Red Hat Network Management wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 07:09, Hiren Patel wrote:
> 
> > i have been searching redhat's knowledgebase about using rhel within a
> > business environment, whats allowed and what is not in terms of
> > copying and installing on many machines etc.
> > 
> > but i am still not clear about what they mean there.
> > am i allowed to use media from one subscription i bought, to do
> > installations on many pc's, am i allowed to copy and share redhat
> > media with friends? from what i gather, this is allowed and the only
> > thing i am not allowed to do is use software obtained from redhat
> > network on those other pc's, or share that with friends.
> 
> I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to try and interpret their terms to
> the letter, but rather convey what I understand actually matters. In any
> case, my experience and impression is that RH tries to imply that one
> has more limited rights than are really the case, presumably to maximise
> their revenue. (In recent years, RH has seemed to me to be more and more
> corporate and to compete better with the likes of MS by fighting fire
> with fire, but that's another story.)
> 
> Right.
> 
> The impression I get is that if you have at least one subscription and
> you download ISO disc media copies, and do pretty much what you like
> with them, then that's not much of a big deal. The most important thing
> and the bit that RH are charging you for is the update service (where
> your machine checks in regularly and retrieves patches etc. using
> up2date or yum, via RHN). There are also subscriptions for some
> additional management features on RHN, satellite, and other things. But
> I think you're asking about the basic update service.
> 
> However, it is important to realise that there are lots of updates and
> patches, and from time to time, RH releases a massive pile of patches
> for many packages installed on even a fairly basic system, and therefore
> the value to you of using shared and copied ISO media is very quickly of
> little or no benefit. You should use Fedora instead, because then you
> can keep updated for free.
> 
> It took me a while to try Fedora after many years of experience with
> paid-for RH, and have found it to be very easy to migrate skills to the
> alternative. Updates are pretty frequent, the lack of central RHN
> management is not a big issue for the systems where I use it, and I
> reserve the RHEL licenses for just the systems where security matters,
> typically because they're Internet-facing on one or more interfaces.
> 
> So, I reckon you probably can copy the media but *not* share the updates
> or patched downloads, or benefit from RHN management features - although
> I think you'd be better using Fedora instead of copying the media.
> 
> HTH :)
> 
> 
-- 
Hiren Patel

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