Roger:
1) a small point of netiquette: please don't respond to the list with
short, non-informative messages such as "thanks for the reply", or
"interesting point". They don't add anything to the discussion and
only serve to increase the already heavy volume of the list and make
it more tedious to slog through the archives.
2) regarding "I am looking at using Fedora at my work and some people
are asking...", I don't know if you mean only for your personal use
or if you're pushing to convert others in your office to it, but I
find it hard to understand how you could be an effective advocate
if you apparently hadn't ever even looked at the fedora web site!
But good luck with that ... you will probably find that, as with
most things involving politics and/or religion (and there's a little
of both in this debate ;-), most people will either love or hate the
idea, and most of those (on either side) will not have logical or
well-thought-out reasons why.
3) I'm surprised no one's brought up the beer/liberty dichotomy of the
term "free" (well, one person did alude to the GPL). If I understand
your use of the term, you mean "free" in the monetary sense, as do
the people who are asking you these questions. This is the beer
sense of the word, as in "free beer". At some level, NOTHING is
free in the "free beer" sense. True, Fedora Core (and many other
Linux distros) are available to be downloaded gratis, or can be had
for at most a paltry fee, but they are not truly without expense -
if you're using it, you have to put time and effort (even if no
actual money) into learning it and maintaning it, and at some point
you may find you need to pay somebody to do some of that for you.
With commercial software you pay a fee (often a recurring fee,
either for maintenence contracts or upgrades), but you generally
get support from the vendor (at least ostensibly). People can
argue till they're blue in the face about whether commercial
software is more expensive overall than non-commercial, but the
difference in the expense arena is not as huge as most make it
out to be.
The real difference lies in the OTHER sense of "free", liberty.
As others have already mentioned, very few commercial software
vendors will allow you to see, let alone tinker with, the internals
of their software, or if they do they probably charge you a lot of
money for the priviledge and/or make you sign an NDA which prohibits
you from allowing others outside your organization to see or use
your modifications (unless you pay them even more money). With free
(in the "liberty" sense) software, you have not only the choice but
the right to do these things, and THAT is the real "selling" point
of free software, at least in my mind. For a more thorough (and
probably cogent) treatment of this topic, refer to Richard
Stallman's treatises at www.fsf.org.
Also note that non-gratis versions of Linux (such as RedHat) are
still free in the "liberty" sense. People often confusedly think
that the GPL requires you to give things away gratis. This is
absolutely untrue (otherwise, companies like RedHat couldn't be
in business). What the GPL DOES require is that (a) IF you give
(or sell) someone else a program that you have modified (or written
yourself) that is covered by the GPL, then you MUST also make the
source available to them, and (b) you can't stop them from doing
any of the things that the GPL gave you the right to do. And yes,
in theory this means that if you sell a GPL'd program to one person,
that person can turn around and give it away to everybody in the
world, and you won't get another cent. In practice this doesn't
happen, because (a) people don't generally give away things that
they paid for, and (b) hardly anyone is selling JUST the code,
what they're REALLY charging for is support.
-g
/------------------------------------------\
| Greg Forte gforte@xxxxxxxx |
| IT - User Services 302-831-1982 |
| University of Delaware Newark, DE |
\------------------------------------------/
