Salam Alaikom. I have a friend in college, and we've been arguing a couple of days ago about Linux and FOSS. And he seems to almost believe that FOSS is nothing but another marketing technique.
And he tends to prove that by mentioning the fact that Red Hat used to give their Linux distro to everyone free of charge, but they no longer do that, except for Red Hat's twin, Fedora, which is mainly a development branch. And he also says that Microsoft charges you for Windows in order to provide you with technical support. While Ubuntu is given to you for free, and it comes to you with absolutely no warranty. And he also mentioned that, in his own opinion, nobody works for free, and everything happens for a reason, so this means that there is no such thing called: "FOSS programmers don't work for money. " So, this way, in his own opinion, he arrived at the fact that being open source is nothing but a mere marketing trick, and Ubuntu might become closed and start forcing you to buy their products at any time. Oh yeah, he also mentioned that, for example, MySQL used to be free, but now that it's bought by IBM (And I'm not sure where he got that information, 'coz Wikipedia, for example, doesn't mention anything about that) it won't stay free the way it was before. Can you please help me understand FOSS, so that I'll be able to answer him? Thanks in advance. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jolug" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Jolug?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
