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Adam Williamson wrote: | On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 07:17, Stefan van der Eijk wrote: | Charge more, sell books, make the Club better, go busking on the streets | of Paris...anything but adverts. ADVERTS. guh.
Yes, probably nothing is more annoying than ads. I do not care about much of the ads they proposed, but replacing the default screensavers with ads is BAD. People using MDK in companies are not going to be amused, when an ad for a competitor appears in the screensaver and there is no way to get a normal screensaver (this seems to be implied by the article :-((, and yes, people do use screensavers).
The (reasonable !! - i.e. no Microsoft or porn) ads in the installer, bookmarks or default web page are OK, it is trivial to get rid of them anyway, installer is used just once, so it is OK. Screensavers are a different cup of tea, though.
I have no problem for MDK to get some cash, but doing it by making the downloadable version annoying/unusable is probably not the right thing. If they want to make the distro commercial, OK, but be straight and up-front about that - i.e. no free downloads, just source as mandated by GPL etc., in other words, the Suse model and properly announced, not just on some obscure web page.
Moreover, how long would it take for somebody to download the distro, remove the ads and publish something like "Madrake-lite" (ok, under different name, since Madrake is trademarked) ? Everybody is free to do it, because the code is under GPL. I do not think that anybody will download the version with ads anymore after that (just compare how many people use Netscape 7.x vs Mozilla), essentially killing the original distro.
Regards,
Jan
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Jan Ciger VRlab EPFL Switzerland GPG public key : http://www.keyserver.net/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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