On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 15:53 -0500, Chad Smith wrote: > On 11/26/05, Shawn K. Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 09:09 -0500, Chad Smith wrote: > > > If you're selling burned CDs for $5 a pop, you don't have a > > > lot of profit to advertise with, and if you selling pressed CDs in a > > > box for $25 or higher, for a number of reasons, you're probably going > > > to change the name. If not only for fear of the wrath of the > > > community, also to keep your customers for yourself, and not let them > > > know they can download it for free.
> > "Wrath of the community?" RMS himself says there's nothing wrong with > > selling copies of free (as in freedom) software and in fact used to sell > > tapes with the latest version of Emacs for $150 each back in the day. > Last I checked, RMS wasn't a regular contributor to the OpenOffice.org > project. And I'm referring here specifically to the OOo community. > There are many instances where people were yelled at, called thefts, > and much worse for selling OOo for anything more than cost. Have you read this: (from <http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html>) Since "free" refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program which people are not free to include on these collections is not free software. Now, trying to pass off OOo as your own work and putting a Microsoft-style EULA on it is quite wrong on more than one level. But simply selling a copy of OOo and labeling it as such, I don't see a problem with. -- Shawn K. Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
