FC is available for free download. RH (after 9) is not. Get it? Name me a legal mirror site that has the later Red Hat (unaltered) available. FC is all over the place. If you don't understand the legalistics, you can guess what is behind it, and interpolate what the law is.
You don't seem to understand what proprietary means. As Sunner pointed out everything included in RHEL is available for free as the GPL mandates. The fact that RH doesn't provide an installer is a non-issue and it's the reason that things like WhiteBox or whatever it's called can exist.
Things were broken that always had worked, and, being the knowledgeable experts they were, they tracked them down to simple items that QC could easily have found
If they were so simple to track down why didn't those "experts" try the RCs and report them before the release?
but which were fine in White Box (=RH).
The fact that RHEL includes software that's usually several revsions older than that's in FC has nothing to do with it? First people bitch that distros like Debian include software that's too old then they bitch that FC is too new, make up your mind.
They include some proprietary stuff in the offical RH releases.
Other than logos or branding, name one.
As I under stand it, it is primarily the Red Hat trademark that is all over the place. They can't legally have that in their distro. (If you run across any more, they want you to notify them so they can take it out.)
Duh, they have to protect their name brand. The fact that RedHat is a registered trademark does not in any way make their software proprietary.
Red Hat is particularly sensitive to being open source (no MP3 decoder?), which makes it vulnerable to cloning by using only the sources.
Which infers that their software isn't proprietary since it's under the GPL. And the MP3 decoders aren't included because RH doesn't want to pay for a MP3 license and they don't want to distribute potentially illegal software like most other distros do.
I guess the linux-philes are under the impression that because a distro uses open sources, the distro is non-proprietary. Wrong.
Do you even know what proprietary means? RH doesn't even own most of the code they ship, it's just repackaged software owned by people all around the world. The only things they probably own the rights to are the installer, art and custom config tools they include. So technically the installer could be called proprietary, but it's GPL'd so it's irrelevant.
Mandrake has a free limited edition on 3 CDs, and another proprietary version with more. There are no out-in-the-open sites that have the latter version. Sites like cheapbytes.com and others sell the free version CDs (copies), but not the pay version CDs. Why? They can't do it legally
Mandrake is irrelevant to the discussion. AFAIK, and I haven't verified this recently, they do included some closed source software in their pay-for distribution which would make it illegal to distribute without their permission. RH doesn't do that.
As usual, the linux-philes state things positively as if they knew what they were talking about. But they don't, as usual. You can't legally copy the non-free version of Red Hat. That makes iit proprietary.
Yes, you can and no, it doesn't.
Face it: People do not give away their own work without some compensation, when their livelyhood depends on it, even if they are using the work of others for free.
RH gives away a lot of stuff for free. Their installer is GPL, all of their custom tools are GPL, they bought GFS from Sistina and rereleased it under the GPL. Find me one piece of software that RH distributes that isn't under the GPL, I haven't looked too closely but I don't think there is one.
OTOH, your replies don't contain evidence of thought. Better not to reply at all.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...