> Also, you should read the fine print from any other Linux vendor – RHEL, Oracle, etc. You don't have to go on "my understanding from several reliable sources", the documents actually state they'll terminate you as a customer if you redistribute their stuff.
While that may be true for Oracle (I doubt it), it's absolutely not true for Red Hat and SUSE. Not only are most of our projects developed in the open under free software licenses in the first place, we provide corresponding source for every package (regardless of the license terms, as long as it's a free software package) through our package manager as source RPMs.
The only restrictions that companies such as Red Hat and SUSE have is related to trademarks and distribution of the binaries that we compiled.
* Trademarks are a completely separate set of laws to copyright, and it has been long accepted in the free software community that as long as it is reasonably easy to remove trademark branding then this is acceptable (in Red Hat's and SUSE's cases, all branding is placed in separate and clearly marked packages -- so you can remove it by replacing those packages)[1].
* As for distribution of binaries, this policy exists for practical reasons and doesn't affect the community (the sources are available and we also provide an entire build service [Open Build Service[2]] that you can use directly to rebuild all of our sources and ISO images if you wished to).
openSUSE Leap is a community distribution created from the SLE sources. CentOS is similarly a distribution built from the RHEL sources.
[ I work for SUSE, and am also an FSF member -- I find spreading of misinformation like this incredibly harmful to the wider community. I would not work for SUSE if I felt that our actions were mistreating users. Opinions my own, obviously. ]
While that may be true for Oracle (I doubt it), it's absolutely not true for Red Hat and SUSE. Not only are most of our projects developed in the open under free software licenses in the first place, we provide corresponding source for every package (regardless of the license terms, as long as it's a free software package) through our package manager as source RPMs.
The only restrictions that companies such as Red Hat and SUSE have is related to trademarks and distribution of the binaries that we compiled.
* Trademarks are a completely separate set of laws to copyright, and it has been long accepted in the free software community that as long as it is reasonably easy to remove trademark branding then this is acceptable (in Red Hat's and SUSE's cases, all branding is placed in separate and clearly marked packages -- so you can remove it by replacing those packages)[1].
* As for distribution of binaries, this policy exists for practical reasons and doesn't affect the community (the sources are available and we also provide an entire build service [Open Build Service[2]] that you can use directly to rebuild all of our sources and ISO images if you wished to).
openSUSE Leap is a community distribution created from the SLE sources. CentOS is similarly a distribution built from the RHEL sources.
[ I work for SUSE, and am also an FSF member -- I find spreading of misinformation like this incredibly harmful to the wider community. I would not work for SUSE if I felt that our actions were mistreating users. Opinions my own, obviously. ]
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli... [2]: https://build.opensuse.org/