I'm not a techie so this is a user's perspective. Red Hat is just as free as Debian so there's no issue there like there is with SuSE and Caldera. There are far more Red Hat users out there and lots of RPMs. So give it a try and decide for yourself. I use Debian because its so easy to keep it stable, because I think apt-get is way way easier than rpm and because the support offered by this list is great. Patrick