HELP KEEP LINUX FREE! A plee to Mandriva!

[..:RUDI:..]

I have started a plee to Mandriva to keep their products and most ways of getting them free! The have different licenses, Downloadable and Commercial! Linux is free!!!

Help to keep it this day!

I wrote them an e-mail at 7:37 this morning

I'm sorry if you may find this rude but I'm afraid to say that it is the way it should happen. I love your Linux products and am using Mandrake Linux 9.0 as it happens right now. Upon trying to upgrade/download Mandriva Linux 10.1 PP+ I found that we could use your 'High speed servers', I thought that would be brilliant because with trying overnight to download from a public server, the download stopped at 400mb! So anyway I thought i'd have a go at using your 'High speed servers' until I found that you had to pay for them! I'm very sorry to say this but Linux should be 100% free, no matter from who you get it from, you shouldn't have to pay. I have always liked Linux as their initial products were free, but now you cannot download the products without paying! Red Hat might putting be me towards their Fedora Core products as they are widely available of their high-speed servers AND torrents at no extra cost!!

Why do you have different licenses for your Linux products too, commercial and downloaded! Why? Linux is a free, Open source program as I have said before in this mail! Surely you cannot have a commercial version of a free program, and if so, what differences are there? This is completely outrageous to think that some people will pay money for a free product!

I will be looking forward to a reply,

Rudi Visser

I hope that some other people will do the same, and if they do, please post what you sent!

Mandriva's e-mail address is [email protected]

[uniquegodwin]

How will those people earn money if they give everything for free? They need to pay their staff too
Thats why they have 2 versions.One is for people who can pay and the other is for people who cant afford.
And secondly,in the version you pay and get,you get softwares from thirdparty who dont give their software for free.In the free version of Mandrivia linux,you get all the softwares given for free from thirdparties.A part of the money you pay to buy the commercial one goes to the thirdparty software companies

[uniquegodwin]

But,yeah,it would really be nice if they would only give everything for free...

[..:RUDI:..]

Well I think that Linux should be Free, along with everything that comes with it!!!

All software should be open source! See my new thread in here!! About Open Source things, if I can be bothered to make it

[uniquegodwin]

If everything be made open source ,then from where will programmers get food for the work they do?

[Cander]

RUDI, you REALLY do not know what you are talking about. Open Source is about freedom, not no cost. The open source movement, even the most hardcore advocates, have no problem paying for open source projects. As long as they are allowed to do with it what they want. Read the GPL sometime. I can take a GPL project, rename it and sell it a long as I provide the source and acknowledge where it came from.

How do you expect companies likes Mandriva and Red Hat to stay in business if they cannot charge anything to make some money?

Besides, you said yourself you could still download it for free, just not as fast, so I do not even see what your problem is.

Again, open source is not about no cost, it is about freedom.