Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
The largest and oldest hardware-cum-software vendor in the world supports GNU/Linux on their PCs. May be you did not ask the right question?
Who is this, HP? (Because if it was them, I remember seeing no such option on their websites 2 years ago.) What prominent laptop manufacturer had a fully supported GNU/Linux line a couple of years ago? Maybe I didn't look hard enough when I bought it, but they sure weren't easy to find.
Not very sure of that. Maybe, going by hearsay, this holds good for the free-as-in-beer version of RH which we used to get till sometime back. Cannot say the same for the paid version. I have not used the paid version, so dunno. Hope somebody will clarify on whether paid isos from RH contain non-free binaries.
This is true for all their software. These are the guys that shipped with an ultra broken GNOME (0.1x or something) fueling it's development while others happily shipped a non-free functional QT based KDE. The "free as in beer" version was (and is) fully free software. (They are not Suse or something). If you want, you can download the sources [ ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/ ] for their enterprise line (RHEL or whatever) and compile it yourself. Everything is open, including the installer. All you can't do is go about selling it under the name of RedHat, which is their trademark. Fair enough I'd say. If you're interested, as I was searching for the download link, I found their business model [ http://www.redhat.com/about/mission/business_model.html ].
I somehow respect them even more now.
Tha apart, a major component of the RPM system is considered non-free by Debian since its license imposes burdens on users.
What portion is this? As far as I can see, it seems to be GPL [ http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/s1-rpm-resources-license.html ]
Harish