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Re: "The Free software Movement is a Scam" -Alfred Szmidt GNU.org


From: Peter Gordon
Subject: Re: "The Free software Movement is a Scam" -Alfred Szmidt GNU.org
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 18:27:51 -0500 (CDT)
User-agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.4

Karen Hill said:
> A box license from MS is a one time purchase for a reasonable price,
> redhat you must pay every year.  MS gives you security updates via
> windows update for free.  Not so with Linux in terms of redhat.  Like I
> said before what good is freedom if I can't afford it?

A box license from Red Hat gives you a copy of all source code used to
create the operating system and the relevant applications. If you want to,
you can stop paying Red Hat and continue using/maintaining the system from
this source code yourself. That's bad, as it takes your time from doing
other, more productive, things. You're not paying Red Hat for the actual
software. You're paying Red Hat for the services. You're paying Red Hat
for things like speedy bugfix and security updates. You're paying Red Hat
for things like the physical cost of producing the disc(s) that the system
uses. You're paying Red Hat so that, if something goes wrong, you or your
company and go to Red Hat and say, "Here. Fix this. It's not working."
When you do this, they have to fix it. Why? Because, since you have the
entire source code, if they don't fix it you could go to another vendor.
Thus, Red Hat must continue to ship high-quality products in order to stay
in business.

Besides, there are other people, such as those of the CentOS project, who
take Red Hat's source RPMs and build them into a completely free (as in
"no cost" and freedom) system, with the same updates and errata for many
years as Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution. (In fact, the current
CentOS and the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux are almost(?) always
binary-compatible with each other.)

Aside from that, there are literally hundreds of other GNU/Linux
distributions to choose from. If you want a totally no-cost system, you
could try something else, such as Fedora Core (Red Hat's
community-supported, "unofficial" GNU/Linux distro), Gentoo, Debian,
Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, etc.

--Peter


(On a side note: This is the first of about 30 emails on this list that
I've received that hasn't been spam... Who's in charge of the mail
gateway, and would you *please* install at least a very basic spam filter?
^_^)



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