On 2022-02-10 20:05, Celejar wrote:
I'm genuinely curious about this: time and money are both scarce and
precious resources. Why is there an assumption that people will gladly
donate of their time to help others, but not their money? Is it because
the assumption is that the person asking for help should just spend
his own money, but may not be able to solve his problem by spending his
own time?
I think this is the distinction between free speech and free beer (two
different meanings of the word free in English).
That is the difference between freedom (no restrictions), and something
being gratis (no cost).
Debian is committed to free software, as in users are free to modify the
software, and they have access to the source code.
Debian is not a charity that provides free hardware to people who need
computers.
Since there is not much cost to distributing software online Debian does
so for free (on their servers and through mirrors), but the important
goal is that the users who get the software have the freedom to modify it.
See:
https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
and
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
(the related point in the Debian Free Software Guidelines that there
cannot be a fee required to distribute the software, doesn't mean that
one can't charge a fee (for either a CD or download), but rather that
one can't put requirements on further redistribution after that)
Bijan