Your comment below is worthless and its clear that you did not read the thread. Please read the thread and before commenting so that we don't have to waste time. I think your small point of netiquette comment makes sense. You should follow it too. "...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!" -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Greg Forte Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 7:14 PM To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Why Would Fedora be Free ? Can it be Trusted? 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 | \------------------------------------------/ -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
