Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2407 mails)

[mha@xxxxxxxx (Michael Hasenstein)]

"Timothy R. Butler" wrote:
> 
> Not just you guys, Linux in general has just gone up in price in the last year or
> so. RedHat is the worst offender, I just didn't expect all of the Linux distros to
> follow RH's example like they have. As long as it stops at the current level, I'll
> keep buying it.

It's FREE (in the meaning of: you don't need to pay).

By the way, are you aware that many of the guys who used to contribute
their time for free now get paid enormous amounts of money buy the Linxu
companies to do the same stuff for everyone (that means everyone profits
since it's still GPL) as before, but now full-time? (plus, if you don't
get paid most projects die after a while, or at least loose their major
original contributors, because after a while everyone looses interest in
doing stuff for free that you no longer care that much about - after
all, you had had your fun and experience already and the 'rush' is over)

Even according to Richard Stallman the GPL and the word FREE does not
mean 'no money' but 'freedom'.Linux companies are supposed to make money
through services, not licenses. Well, that's exactly what we do. You
don't purchase a license. You can install one SuSE Linxu package at
1000000 computers. You don't even need the one package, just download it
for FREE (meaning: no money). Our services are to make the distribution,
to have a kernel that works a lot better than a stock kernel (plus more
features, like raw IO, reiserfs, lvm, bigmem, etc.), and to contribute
back to the community an enourmous amount of stuff, from XFree86 over
ALSA and kernel development incl drivers, e.g. SCSI and IDE, to user
interfaces (we've core developers for both KDE and Gnome) or things like
OpenLDAP, the joystick driver, and numerous other projects.
Of course, if everyone really just downloaded the free (meaning no
money) version off the net these efforts would slow down because we
couldn't effort all the developers (far more than 100 people you can
call 'core developers', i.e. they're involved in core projects, and
don't just fiddle around with the icons of the default SuSE desktop),
unless the business customers could subsidize development for everyone
else.

And it's still FREE (free, free, free, in the meaning of: you don't need
to pay). I really don't understand your problem. You can download both
RH and SuSE for FREEEEEEEEE.


-- 
Michael Hasenstein
http://www.suse.de/~mha/
SuSE Linux AG, Nuernberg (Germany)
SuSE Inc., Oakland, California (US)

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