On 2022-02-10 20:05, Celejar wrote:
I'm genuinely curious about this: time and money are both scarce and precious resources. Why is there an assumption that people will gladly donate of their time to help others, but not their money? Is it because the assumption is that the person asking for help should just spend his own money, but may not be able to solve his problem by spending his own time?
I think this is the distinction between free speech and free beer (two different meanings of the word free in English).
That is the difference between freedom (no restrictions), and something being gratis (no cost).
Debian is committed to free software, as in users are free to modify the software, and they have access to the source code.
Debian is not a charity that provides free hardware to people who need computers.
Since there is not much cost to distributing software online Debian does so for free (on their servers and through mirrors), but the important goal is that the users who get the software have the freedom to modify it.
See: https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines and https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html(the related point in the Debian Free Software Guidelines that there cannot be a fee required to distribute the software, doesn't mean that one can't charge a fee (for either a CD or download), but rather that one can't put requirements on further redistribution after that)
Bijan