On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 23:00, Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> This is going to be a hair-splitting discussion. You could argue I guess
> that in the above cases you're paying for the service and the
> non-distributable stuff. But if you define RHEL as a Linux, it is one
> which is not free. Some componenets of it are free-of-charge, but RHEL
> isn't.
Richards Stallman's intentions were never to let the GPL force you to make it free as in free beer, but free as in the
freedom of having a look at the source, modify it and redistribute it. That's it.
It's the ever lasting discussion between the two lairs that exist within the Open Source community.
Never the less, the discussion started with the term "cheap" for Linux (which i wouldn't categorise "free of charge")
which certainly is true in comparison to other stuff out there, that does the same thing.
And the term free (as in free beer) is not even correct in terms of the kernel, simply because "time is money" and it
will take you a lot time to compile your own distribution, if you do it from scratch and even though, how much time
did you spend in configuring and compiling for your workplace or server ?
Just my 2c.
/Martin
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