Open Stack

On 20/06/16 18:50, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2016-06-20 18:43:44 +0200 (+0200), Zane Bitter wrote:
>> The binaries are free-as-in-beer - IIUC you can't redistribute them. The
>> source code, of course, remains free-as-in-speech as it has always been.
>> (It's easy to forget the distinction when you work in Python all day and
>> there are no binaries, but it's the source code that counts.) And of course
>> there are freely-distributable binaries built from that source available in
>> the form of CentOS.
> [...]
>
> Not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but as a
> long-time-away-from-Red-Hat user my (possibly quite outdated)
> experience was that RHEL included some non-free/proprietary software
> distributed alongside other free-as-in-speech software. If this is
> still true, it would be a significant mischaracterization to claim
> that the "source code" for RHEL as a whole is consistently free.

That isn't my understanding, but it's hard to give a definitive answer 
without knowing what kinds of non-free software you're referring to 
(since I know there have been fierce disagreements even e.g. within 
Debian on topics like firmware blobs). Certainly if anything in 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main bothers you then you'll 
probably be unhappy.

There *is* a "Supplementary" channel that includes non-free software - 
IBM Java (ikr? apparently that's a real thing), certain CJK fonts... 
that kind of random, obscure stuff - but you have to download a separate 
DVD and/or enable a separate yum repo that is disabled by default. 
You'll never need to go near it.

But e.g. if a user wants to install the proprietary nVidia driver, RH 
tells them to go download it from nVidia.[1] It's not shipped in RHEL or 
even the Supplementary channel.

cheers,
Zane.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/solutions/5258 (paywalled, sorry):

> If
> _all_ software provided by RHEL is also now included under free and
> open licenses, then I'm thrilled and may be more inclined to give it
> a try again in the future.
>