My primary OS is Windows (I use it for work) and I have Linux as my second OS. If I upgrade my linux distro to the paid version so I can have more features, will Windows be okay? Thanks I’m a newb
My primary OS is Windows (I use it for work) and I have Linux as my second OS. If I upgrade my linux distro to the paid version so I can have more features, will Windows be okay? Thanks I’m a newb
It’s kind of creepy, weird, and unusual. However, I can see someone building a distro and creating a bunch of non-OSS themes and basically selling the themes. That’s not beyond the pale, although it is (again) questionably moral given that they probably created all of those themes using free software that they didn’t pay for. But whatever… just keep that in mind.
The usual way of commoditizing Linux is to sell service - so you get, like, 4 tickets a month or something where someone is guaranteed to be there to try to fix whatever problem you have within a reasonable amount of time, and you don’t have to either rely on the kindness of strangers.
Zorin is mainstream enough that I suspect if they were really violating the GPL, someone would be on their case already. You can’t - usually, depending on the license - just repackage OSS and sell it. So if that’s how you wanted to spend your money, you do you and don’t worry about the comments on this thread.
Oh, about your question: according to the upgrade page, the “upgrade” is just access to more packages, probably in another repos. You won’t have to re-install the distribution, and there won’t be any impact on your dual boot. You’re just getting more packages to install.
I’m pretty sure you can. GNU’s Selling Free Software is for the GPL & doesn’t specifically address selling someone else’s OSS. But you should (I think?) be able to, so long as you don’t violate the license. There are multiple views to selling foss, but I don’t think that many will object, if you for example sell Linux DVDs at a low cost. (Not common any more, but this has been done before, I’ve heard)
I don’t know much about Zorin, but selling foss is not inherently evil & illegal.
The whole thing about selling DVDs was that you were selling the DVD, not the distribution on it. You were “charging a reasonable price for the service of burning the DVD, for the media, and for distribution.” Much of that went away with the internet, when people could download and burn ISOs themselves. It used to be quite common; not just distributions, but CDs full of OSS software. Again, the assumption and expectation was that you weren’t selling the software, but the media. There was no such thing as a “Pro” version of Linux. There were commercial distributions, and there was a period when companies were trying to figure out ways to commoditize OSS, but there were also lawsuits, and it mostly settled out to be service agreements, which were in the end more lucrative anyway.
I disagree about the immorality of selling FOSS. Even in the very rare case that you built the entire program, from scratch, using no FOSS libraries, you probably still used gcc, or the Python interpreter, or go or rustc. And on most cases, you are using libraries that other people created and gave away for free. And instead of giving back to the community, so that the people who’s software you’re implicitly selling that your software is built and depends on, can’t use it similarly for free. And odds are also good that, despite your shim is utterly reliant on their hard work, you’re not splitting up the profit and sharing it with them. How much money do those people send to Linus Torvalds? Or the countless kernel contributors? To the people who’ve worked on libc?
I have absolutely no issue with people who request donations for the software that they built and regularly and consistently maintain. And people charging for OSX or Windows software? It costs more than just free time to develop and release on those platforms - the entire chain is commercial. But when your product is an unmeasurably tiny fraction of all of the gratis effort that went into the end product, well. It doesn’t seem right to profit on other’s work, does it?
Look, we’re a capitalist society. It takes someone time and material to make a chair from scratch, and when you take it, they don’t have it any more. They used nothing free except maybe YouTube videos, or their parent’s training. The FOSS software ecosystem is the closest thing we have to a functioning communism in the world; it works because, while it may take my time to create something, it doesn’t cost me more than my time, and once it’s done it can be endlessly replicated and used by innumerable people at no significant cost to me. When actors take advantage of the free ecosystem and don’t contribute back in like fashion, in my book that’s unethical.
Stallman’s usual take is “Yeah sure you can sell it, as long as you respect the 4 freedoms.”. So I don’t think selling Free Software is against the spirit of FOSS. The issue is rather that the Free Software is against the spirit of selling because realistically you can sell it to one entity which can then just make 7 billion copies of said software. At that point it’s no longer financially viable to sell it for you.
I also think that the majority of people creating Free Software would be fine with someone else selling it. Remember how much permissive-licensed software is out there. If authors really cared, they would have licensed the software under GPL, but instead they even allow it to be used with commercial licensing. Obviously I’m not taking away your opinion, but I don’t think your opinion represents the majority of FOSS.