quote:
Originally posted by mushrooomprince:
I thought it was Linux ? Linux is linux right ?
WHy don't you talk to me about it on aim calum ?
linux is linux and linux is only about 4% of any operating system. the rest is added stuff. the trend is to make whole systems based on GNU, and other open source styles of software. perl, sendmail, XFree86 are all on non GPL licences but they are still open source. in fact the majority of linux software is nonGPL, about an estimated 27% of most linux systems are GPL software.
as it happens some distributors make the effort to have only open source software in their distribution but most have at some point also had distributions which have at least some closed source stuff, and often they charge for the 'privelege'. for example Mandrake released a special box set edition of mandrake 8.2 with some closed source games (the sims etc) and charged for it (presumably because they had to pay to sell the games), SuSE have always charged for their distribution (i think) because it includes some non-free components. debian and slackware have never done this. red hat have never done it, but this is not from altruism, it is because they wanted to be popular amongst open source purists. Solaris has always been a distribution which charges money and is closed source (so no linux, no GPL stuff, no source code CDs), Caldera's first linux distro was a bare bones linux with a proprietary (and expensive) GUI and desktop environment, they felt they could not make a profit unless they bundled payfer software on the CDs with the "freeware", and now LindowsOS. they include a lot of GPL stuff on their CD, and they can provide source code if required, as the GPL states, but they also include closed source payfer software of their own, exactly the same as caldera did eleven years ago. Unlike red hat and mandrake (whose additional software is all GPL), Lindows have chosen to keep their new software closed source and to charge for it. i think the going rate for a LindowsOS CD is about $130 at the moment (up from $99 last year, a rise of 30%, is it worth it?) and of course since the majority of the software you actually get is available on a free CD you can download from mandrake, slackware, debian etc etc, you have to ask yourself, how much extra software is on here? and is it worth the extra money? other distros have perfectly goof free GPL software that does exactly this click and run stuff etc. My red hat uses apt and synaptic, they make software installation and updating into a task even a five year old could cope with easily.
so those in brief are my thoughts on why lindows, like caldera (
now trading as SCO) are not part of the open source community.
[ September 04, 2003: Message edited by: Calum ]
