Programmers bypass Red Hat Linux fees

The business model of Red Hat revolves around selling support for the product, not around the product itself. As stated in the article, Red Hat regards the "bypass" of these programmers as a form of advertising for their product. Under the terms of the GPL this is all legal and permitted.

CNET doesn't get it.

Aye, the best piece of it is where the authore labels CentOS as "not entirely free" because they ask for donations. Mr. Shankland truly doesn't grok Free Software. He should have a look at the FSF and OSI webpage really soon.

They also did not understand the *entire* "the source is open, you can modify it and pass the fixes back to the community, which *includes* Red Hat" concept. This means RH gets many more eyes to quality check the product they're distributing. Also to reply to the C|Net comment saying they won't want to improve their product since they're in the service business, that's an interesting point -- but not worth worrying about since it's *open source* -- people are still going to be fixing the code anyway, and if someone clones it and does a better, free job of fixing bugs, then RH loses service contracts.

Duh. This would have been labeled "Obvious" on fark.