Re: [LUG] linux history questions

[Alex Charrett <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2002-06-22 at 10:34, Roland Tarver wrote:
> Commercial linux:
>        I'm still struggling with understanding why we pay for distro's of linux
> off the shelf in a computer shop.  I thought linux was a free OS. Free as in
> £0 and source-included. Do we simply pay for the production cost, disks
> manuals etc. Or do we also pay for the convenience of have a kernel with
> tons of other packages and programs bundled with it - ready to be _easily_
> installed (ie by a non-expert user, that can follow, for eg, the suse YAST)

You're making the common mistake of confusing price with liberty. 
There's no reason that any Linux distribution shouldn't be sold as long
as the source code is also available.

The important "freedoms" that you get with open source are that you have
the ability to modify the source code as you wish, also just having the
source code means you don't get locked into expensive support contracts
with the vendor, because you could take the code to any other willing
company and have them support you if you don't want to do it yourself.

But yes generally when you buy a distribution you are paying for the
costs of the media/manuals etc.  Although I'd certainly hope they're not
*only* covering these costs, I'd like to think that buying an official
release of a distribution goes some way to help keeping them running.

> Source:
>       Is the source from all major distro's included on the disks we get?

The source should be supplied with any boxed-set distro, if it's not
then you should be able to request it from the supplier for cost.  Of
course you can usually also download the source CDs from the companies
ftp site.

Alex.


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