On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 09:40, Wolfgang Bornath wrote: > T. Ribbrock schrieb am Mon, 15 Sep 2003 08:58:59 +0200: >
> Aha. How about this: If a product is good, I don't care whether I have > to pay for it or not, I'll get it. If the product is not good, I don't > care about free versions, I just don't want it. > > You decide that as Mandrake is getting money from elsewhere you can take > the free version. All I see from you is: If I have to pay, I won't take > it, because Mandrake gets enough money from elsewhere. > > OK, everybody has his right to decide, but don't try to construct > reasons where there are none. I'd be perfectly happy with you saying: "I > don't want to pay for a distribution, I want it gratis!" Why not, it's > not illegal. But I complain about the reasons you give for not buying > any more. They are just not right. > > wobo > To be fair Wobo, he really didn't say that. It's about the same with TV-channels. I get a number of channels for free, because they are paid for by the commercials, I don't like it, but I'm not forced to watch them. If I pay a subscription fee for those channels, the commercials are not acceptable. I do not think I should pay to be forced to watch commercials. So, if I pay for my boxed Mandrake distro, it should not contain ads. Now, in all fairness, it is the right of Mandrake as a company to do this, but it is also the right of their users to switch distro if they don't like this. I ditched SuSE a year ago (after 5 years of use - and buying every major release), because I resented the fact that they held YaST in proprietary development, and the last drop was UnitedLinux. SuSE was free to choose their path, just as I was free to protest it by moving to Mandrake, because they better represented my ideals. Now, in a perfect world, Linux (and others) would be developped by non-commercial institutions with government funding. It would be completely free of commercial influences. But this is not a perfect world, our legacy-capitalistic society is not yet really ready for notions of openness and freedom. That is why Linux companies are an 'evil' we need to tolerate. Mandrake is a fine organisation, and I admire a lot of what they do, but I would be even happier to see them as a not-for-profit organization, yet I also know that this would be impossible at this time. As I stated earlier, I will now wait and see how things go over the next months. I will still be using 9.2, but if things progress in the wrong direction I will probably switch to Debian, Gentoo or even FreeBSD (which I am already using on some systems). > > ______________________________________________________________________ > Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? > Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
