Steve Lamb wrote:
Alvin Oga wrote:- debian ... free ... - ubuntu ... commercialized version of debian's "hard work"which to me is wrong to do.. but oh well..Uhhh, Alvin, you've been spreading a lot of disinformation on this list lately. I mean a LOT of disinformation. This is a prime example. From Ubuntu's front page, emphasis mine: Ubuntu will always be ***free of charge***, and there is no extra fee for the "enterprise edition", we make our very best work available to everyone on the same ***Free terms***.
This sentence from their About Ubuntu page seems to indicate that they see themselves as a commercial distribution, however:
"Ubuntu is Free Software, and available to you free of charge. It's also Free in the sense of giving you rights of Software Freedom, but you probably knew that already! Unlike many of the other commercial distributions in the free and open source world (Libranet, Lindows, Xandros, Red Hat) the Ubuntu team really does believe that Free software should be free of software licencing charges."
Actually, they have three repositories, "main", "restricted" and "universal", and different licensing for each. Some of Ubuntu is definitely not Free Software.
Ahh... people can go read it for themselves. But Alvin's not wrong. He's also not 100% right -- as is typically with these things, the issue is more complex than one sentence can adequately display. He just has a slightly different viewpoint than yours.
http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/licensing/document_viewSome people find the Ubuntu spin-off inappropriate (why didn't they just donate to Debian and try to get a commitment on release cycles?), and others have embraced it and are all fuzzy warm about it. Whatever.
Me? I just kick back and enjoy the flamefests and trolling... if there's one thing that never changes about the Net and Free Software, it's that. It's almost comforting to read a good flamefest these days... the joys of my youth, so to speak.
Nate