Re: gEDA-user: More footprint stuff

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> > Now you might think that anybody could just get a copy of RHEL and
> > stick it on the web for free download, thus undercutting RedHat's
> > ability to sell their CDs for more than $0.00.  There is a catch,
> > however.
> 
> This has been done.  Someone went through the RHEL files and carefully
> replaced all the artwork that was not redistributable, and put the
> results online.  It didn't seem to affect RHEL's sales.

That's interesting that somebody would go to all that trouble when FC
is available for free.  (Or Debian, or any of a thousand other Linux
distributions.) 

Anyway, when a company wants to run a copy of RHEL, they are likely to
also want the support & quality assurance that comes with the real
McCoy; they are accordingly willing to pay.  And the advantage of
GPL'ed software in this case is the openness, transparency, and
(usually) stability of Linux.  Also, with Linux there is no vendor
lock-in and mandatory upgrade treadmill.  Those qualitites are also
worth paying for, if you are a serious company.

Too many people focus on the "free as in beer" part of free software.
That's not the only advantage of F/OSS over closed-source stuff.

Stuart