[Mr. K]

ok, I'll ask... how does a company (RedHat) make money selling free software?

[goldstategop]

Like Lindows, Red Hat leverages open source software by offering it for downloading from one location via a subscriber update service. Sure people could look all over the net for free Linux software if they knew where to find it. Most people don't and will happily pay a reasonable fee to download and install it from the company's own servers.

[ShadowAce]

I'm not really up-to-date on Red Hat, but here is what I believe they do...

They sell boxed sets of their distribution--a unique collection of OSS software and the kernel. They also sell support to other businesses/people adopting Linux. They sell an updating subscription to allow you to automagically update your software over the internet.