If Windows could dual boot 1043

Donald McDaniel

Cost estimates are different from practical cost. What, exactly, did it cost to develop GTK?

Much less than a dime, actually. Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days.

The cost certainly doesn't have to be a very high one. All you have to do (at the minimum) is provide a torrent for users to download and seed the disk image once. The cost there would be minuscule.

How would you determine the cost of something that is primarily volunteered for free?

Can be personal expenses on the part of the developers. Not all distributions have central offices.

Not all distributions pay their developers. Indeed, a large portion do not.

Explain these expenses as it relates to, say, Debian. Hell, explain where Debian even *gets* the money for what you describe. AFAIK their only source of income is donations. How do the Apache developers make any money? They may have paid something, but they don't pbutt the cost down to the end user so the software is effectively without cost.

Using proprietary development methods, you would be correct.

But since the bandwidth is often donated, it has no effective cost to the end user.

Or they can open up their favorite torrent search website and search for 'Windows XP' or 'Mac OS X', and get a number of viable disk images (at no cost to them).

Has anyone actually done jail time for *downloading* pirated software? I thought most of the legal attacks were oriented against the distributors...

Why should a software pirate care about your cost? He paid nothing, so why should he give a damn?

Feh, that only applies to physical products.

It's not a cost if someone willingly donates it.