Re: Fw: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update andtransition planning

["Jonathan A. Zdziarski" <jonathan () nuclearelephant com>]

> I find this culture of expecting things for free to be rather interesting.

As in, SuSe was given all of this software for free (with the exception
of a few small tools)?

> The "gift culture" of BSD/GPL I understand and participate in, however the
> outgrowth of this seems to be a "greed culture", case in point people who
> demand easily printable PDF versions of documents I publish in HTML on my
> website or seem to expect that I will help them with their homework (no
> joke).

Isn't it more greedy that companies like RedHat could take the hard work
- donated to the betterment of computer science - of the thousands of
developers who created the projects they're redistributing, and charge
for the compilation?  I don't think it's unreasonable at all to ask that
companies like RedHat contribute their minor tools (installer, config,
etc.) to the same beliefs that these developers contributed to when they
gave their software to the world for free.  That was the original goal
of the FSF, and not to commercialize off of someone else's work.  If the
original goal of the FSF was to turn everyone into little Microsoft's,
nobody would be releasing their software under the GPL.

Personally I think the GPL needs a rewrite to control the
commercialization of the work of others whose original intention was to
give it away.  I've no problem giving away my hard work, but not if my
work is going to make someone else rich.  If I wanted to do that, I'd be
developing more commercial apps and fewer open source apps.  Something
between the QPL and the GPL would be nice.





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