I’ve never bought a distro. I’ve paid someone for the CD and shipping, way back before ISOs and internet speeds at home made downloading it practical. But never have I “bought” for Linux. Every CD I got I could legally copy and give away; or charge for the service.
With few exceptions, what you were paying for the media, the effort of burning and shipping, and shipping. Even with companies like Redhat, what you paid for with Enterprise was service and support, not the software.
I seem to be having this argument frequently lately. Taking someone else’s work, that they gave you for free, putting your own logo on it and then selling it to people is one of the most unethical things that isn’t illegal that I can think of. Selling support services is entirely fair. Selling compute, bandwidth, and space, entirely ethical. But profiting off other’s generosity? How do you justify that? Even if you’re not a socialist or communist, taking a painting someone gave away and then turning around and selling it is disgusting and amoral. You’ve added no value; you’re purely profiting on someone else’s work.
Packaging the software in a distro with an installer and a custom DE adds a lot of value.
I’m not familiar with Zorin specifically, but freely distributing source code and charging for binaries was one of the earliest monetization strategies for GPL code.
I’ve never bought a distro. I’ve paid someone for the CD and shipping, way back before ISOs and internet speeds at home made downloading it practical. But never have I “bought” for Linux. Every CD I got I could legally copy and give away; or charge for the service.
With few exceptions, what you were paying for the media, the effort of burning and shipping, and shipping. Even with companies like Redhat, what you paid for with Enterprise was service and support, not the software.
I seem to be having this argument frequently lately. Taking someone else’s work, that they gave you for free, putting your own logo on it and then selling it to people is one of the most unethical things that isn’t illegal that I can think of. Selling support services is entirely fair. Selling compute, bandwidth, and space, entirely ethical. But profiting off other’s generosity? How do you justify that? Even if you’re not a socialist or communist, taking a painting someone gave away and then turning around and selling it is disgusting and amoral. You’ve added no value; you’re purely profiting on someone else’s work.
Packaging the software in a distro with an installer and a custom DE adds a lot of value.
I’m not familiar with Zorin specifically, but freely distributing source code and charging for binaries was one of the earliest monetization strategies for GPL code.
Yeah… for the authors. That’s fine. You downloading my FOSS, packaging it and selling it is slimy carpet-baggery.