RHEL renewals and accounting practices.

Just a bone to pick on Red Hat's "missing revenue":

Talking about Unpaid RHEL, one should take a moment to enquire with users of the 3-Year susbscription to the RHEL linux ES 4 who were bilked by support not "knowing" the 3-year subscription (which is written on the Licence Agreement documentation hardcopy) after less than 1 year in some cases, which forced this issue.

I'm not sure who the data migration specialist, but whoever it was, failed to comprehend, let alone understand: That there is a significant difference between a 36-month contract, and a 12-month contract. (Or maybe its the difference beween 52 and 156 weeks??)

Out of that fiasco, integrators decided to take on the burden of development and snapshot of using CentOS, or Fedora as an operating system they could support, and rolling out those versions, rather than using RHEL services and an accounting systems that didn't.

Just a personal Freetard issue but...

CentOS is also the only freely available linux platform that can be run for free, on the S/390 mainframe platform either in hardware, or in Software Emulation (Hercules on x86) or in a z/VM partition, without paying exorbinant fees. It also is the only current distribution that is updatable to track RHEL updates and changes.

But then again, there might be someone who will call CentOS to request they take the software that is used, off immeadiately... Now! I tell you! Or there will be lawyers.

-s