On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> mjg223 wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> > > So the 'Official' Red Hat CANNOT be reproduced, and I cannot sell or give away
> > > the work of Red Hat (whether its their programming work or their Customer
> > > Support work is really irrelevant, and a pointless distinction) without
> > > compensating them to the degree they desire.
> >
> > Utter nonsense. I can have all the same bits without the pretty box for
> > free if I grab it off their ftp server, minus some non-free added value
> > junk. I can install it on as many machines as I want, I can burn CDs and
> > pay you to take them from me, I can call it some thing else and start a
> > company putting it a different box. (Witness Mandrake.)
> >
> > Calling the distinction between software and support pointless is
> > insanity. The software is free, paying a human being to help you use it or
> > adapt it to your purposes isn't. That's the whole freaking free-software
> > business model - that's what RMS has been talking about for years.
>
> SInce I work most of my time at a software company, I know there is
> functionally no difference between the two.
I can't copy an engineer at zero cost - that's a rather important
functional difference between software and support/maintenance.
> All the 'free' business model is doing is some sort of hacker-leach
> lotus eating paradise, where people that know what they are doing get
> the software for free, and the unit COST of producing that software
> the distro distributor is externalized through the tech support
> process to make the clueless pay for the free software the geeks are
> using.
I write a piece of software and give it away, free of charge, to anyone
who can use it. I have things I'd rather spend my afternoon doing than
setting it up on your PC but for a few bucks - sure - I'll give you a
hand.
Obviously I'm a hacker-leach, victimizing the clueless.
> RedHat still has to pay its programmers to produce code. Instead of
> making everyone pay their fair share of the cost of producing that
> code that everyone benefits from, they make the newbies pay for it
> all.
Linux was built on support money, unfairly extracted from unjustly
burdened, exploited newbies? Gcc and the Gnu tool set? X-Windows? Kde and
Gnome? Apache? What the hell are you talking about?
-matt
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