Re: Is there a cost for bussiness to use Debian?

[Peter Vandenabeele <peter.vandenabeele@mind.be>]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 12:30:19AM +1000, Steve Cottom wrote:
...
> I have been told that Linux is free for personal use but businesses must 
> pay, I need to comfirm this for this situation.

This statement is incorrect.

Debian consists entirely of "Free" software (Free in the sense of
Freedom, Free to use, copy, modify and redistribute (for GPL
licensed SW there is the "Copyleft" limitation that redistribution, 
if any, needs to occur under the same GPL license). 

As a derived benefit of this freedom, you have the right to 
download/copy/use all the software without paying anyone and 
you have the right to give away (or resell !) the software if
you wish.

What you may refer to is that some businesses will prefer to pay a
support company or a consultant for setting up and maintaining this
set-up. A lot of those companies exist that do support Debian. On 
the other hand, there are also companies like RedHat, Novell, 
Mandrake, ... that do support other Linux based distributions. But 
even those companies have a free-to-download variant of their 
distribution.

You might check the consultants page for a Debian consultant near you:

  http://www.debian.org/consultants/

HTH,

Peter

> Any information you can supply would be much appreciated.
> 
> Thank you for your time
> 
> Steve Cottom