Is linux free 4985
I quoted it to you, and it says that the source of a GPL program is free of charge to...
HalcyonWild
Well, para 3 does. They can charge for the medium, not for the source or access to the source. #3b says: ... a written offer, valid for at least three...
You don't buy Linux, you pay for the media and the service, of putting a stable and working system together. BTW: SuSE has become OpenSuSE, with a similair development model like Debian.
Apropos Debian. This distribution never was commercial, but yet they are selling CDs with Debian on them. This is mainly for the people who don't have a high bandwidth connection.
On 7 Oct 2005 10:09:48 -0700, HalcyonWild staggered into the Black Sun and said: This has always been true AFAICT. ? Debian and Gentoo...
They don't sell the source code. You can perfectly download the sources of all Linux related software, compile and install it yourself. That is then called Linux from scratch. You may even make an image from the system you created and sell this image, as long as you provide all sources you may have changed or that are based on GPL code.
Free in the OSS sense doesn't mean free as in free beer, but rather free in freedom.
I'm playing no such games, in my judgment. There are many such situations with which we all have...
Ever did this yourself? You know how long it takes to build a sane system from the bare sources. Just compiling and linking the whole thing takes over a week, even on a P4 3GHz machine. The only way to make it faster is to compile it on a compiler farm. The other thing is, that there might be bugfixes, patches etc. that should be merged with the sources before compiling. Creating a distribution is a really difficult job. Not to mention the development of the package managers and the actual maintaince of the package database.
I think this is worth the money to pay BUT you can easyly download all known distributions from the servers minus the additional licences third party applications that are not OpenSource. E.g. VMWare or CrossOver Office or Cedega or... And you forget that you not only get a OS but also a full set of user applications, starting from simple text editors, CAD Programs, Vector Graphics, Image Manipulation, Sound Recording and Editing, CD-DVD Authoring, a whole bunch of servers etc. And all this on a neat DVD you get for 70$ comming with support for everything that is on that CD.
Wolfgang Draxinger --
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