OK, here's my two cents:
1) RedHat can charge whatever fees they want and the people that see value in the products/services will pay them 2) RedHat cannot deny access to the code
Basically, if I want to download the RH9 ISOs from RedHat's own servers this week, I'll need to pay some money. If somebody who _has_ paid the money get the ISOs from them and then posts them on another server, it is completely ethical for me to get them from the second server. The early access is just an incentive to sign up for a RedHat service. If you don't sign up, you just have to wait a little while or do some legwork and find another place to get your software fix. I really don't think ethics is even an issue here.
I haven't decided about the ethics of this, but the man who wrote BitTorrent will take a $5 donation if you like his product. Offering RH9 is an incredibly effective way to showcase his product, and he'll probably get a fair number of donations this week.
Judging by how well it's working for me (520Kbps) and how I assume it's distributing the load I'd say if RedHat wants their service to be competitive they need to offer better service than what others are offering. RedHat should have done this themselves. Kudos to the guy who came up with this. It's working beautifully so far.
The coolest part about this is that the more people who participate in the download the better everyone's downloads get. He's taken a huge scalability problem and turned it upside-down. It absolutely brilliant!
One thing I have to wonder is if people will find that their download slows as they approach the end. It seems like that would be the case since many people will not be polite enough to keep the download thingy open after it's done. That's assuming it tries to download linearly, which it probably doesn't.
As for the ethics: I think that, compared to the other RHN services, early access to ISOs is a very small part of what you pay for. I guess that's a way of saying I think it's only very slightly unethical.
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