So they wrote all this code themselves right? No, of course they didn't. The large majority of what they are selling was written by others (kernel, Debian, etc). Are they passing any revenue to their upstream providers? They have every right to try and charge people, but it's very disengineous to run git clone on a FOSS repo,make a few changes then write a big blog post about charging for the output.
>So they wrote all this code themselves right?No, of course they didn't. The large majority of what they are selling was written by others (kernel, Debian, etc).
That's is misleading at most.
It's true that they use other free software, so they don't write all the software themselves. That's a fact, but every other open source project is based in work by other.
The development of Linux kernel is based in work made by individuals at their own expense, but also contributions made by companies (as IBM, Canonical, Red Hat) and donations. Linux have paid software developers (it does not cost you but it cost to somebody).
As far I know, the developers of Elementary OS, are collaborating with the community and they have fixed problems in other open source projects they use themselves as Gtk.
>Are they passing any revenue to their upstream providers?
They have posted bounties (cash) to fix bugs in other software the "upstream providers" in bountysource, so that's public information.
>hey have every right to try and charge people,
That's true!.
> but it's very disengineous to run git clone on a FOSS repo,make a few changes then write a big blog post about charging for the output.
They write their own file-manager (pantheon-files), their own window manager (gala, over mutter), their own configuration system (switchboard). Their calendar application, their calculator, their music player, their movie player... etc.
So that's not easy, and your own phrase is "very disengineous" at least, certainly inaccurate and I hope not bad intentioned.
If that's your argument, then why do we allow thousands of companies to base their proprietary web applications on the FOSS stack? How many of these companies would even exist today without Linux or Ruby or MySQL/Postgres? How much do companies contribute back to these projects? Why is it so bad if elementary OS is based on Debian, but it's completely fine when some startup runs on Debian servers?
Not everyone goes around calling people who download free software for free as cheaters. All this backlash is because of the attitude they are showing towards non paying customers.
Sorry Red Hat killed Red Hat for end users (in favor of maintaining Red Hat for enterprise users)...
And only in recent years admitted it was an error.
So you did chose bad your example.
Cent OS was an answer to that, providing a Red Hat binary distribution without any support, for free.
What they said is that they want to sell elementary OS. But going completely in that direction is pointless because someone will just fork the project and offer it for free. So what they did is make you enter $0, so when you do get it for free, it feels like you've cheated the system.
Let's say everyone starts donating and they receive tons of money. Canonical, Debian and everyone else notices this and starts bitching about how eOS guys cheated the system by earning money off their work but din't pay anything back. Would this still seem right?
This is absurd. Thousands of companies sell proprietary software based on BSD/MIT/Apache libraries every day and contribute absolutely nothing to those projects and no one bats an eye. But another FOSS project takes them and wants to charge money? What a ripoff!
