On 04/04/2015 07:04 AM, Always Learning wrote: > I think it inevitable that Red Hat will introduce some closed source > packages for the its paying customers, ... For the sake of perspective, even in the old Red Hat Linux boxed sets in 1997 this was true. There was a whole CD of closed source stuff that you got in the boxed set that was never available for download. Things like WordPerfect for Linux, for starters. Sybase ASE was in one of the boxed set's Linux Applications CDs (but I seem to remember it being a 'limited' or 'personal' edition). Harking back to 1998, here's what is on that CD for Red Hat Linux 5.2: [lowen at dhcp-pool114 Red Hat Vendor Disc Oct 1998]$ ls -1 AIS Applix ARDI CASEMaker CodeForge Crosswinds Decosoft DigitalControls EST Fastlane Flame Herrin HKS InfoSpring JX KAI Knowledge Knox Multisoft NetWin NExS Perforce README REBOL RPMS SAFE Shpink SpectraLogic Stalker SuSE Sybase Take5 TRANS.TBL VariCAD Visual WGS WP [lowen at dhcp-pool114 Red Hat Vendor Disc Oct 1998]$ This is also true for RHEL, and has been for quite a while. There is a whole 'Supplemental' disc that has packages for which there is no source freely available, although the number of packages on that disc is relatively small, most of it being IBM Java for the 7.1 supplemental server disc. So it is nothing new to have closed source value-add in the Red Hat ecosystem.