Can you read? Have a read of what Richard Stallman says Free Software is:
“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
Read carefully. Several times if you don’t get it at first. Then go cry in a corner for being a jackass
They shouldn’t have used Linux in that case because according to GNU, the FSF and Richard Stallman, if you use Free Software under the GPL you are agreeing to the following:
“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
As you can see, they are required by the principles of free software to let others distribute it, when without changing a single line of code… Don’t go calling us freeloaders when were practicing Free Software principles.
Read. Then read again. Then read again until you get it.
From gnu.org “What is free software?”
“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
As you can see Free Software (and the GPL) says that the end user has the right to FREELY USE AND REDISTRIBUTE the software, AS IS.
In other words, I could get a copy of RHEL and without making a single change, could redistribute it or even sell it.
Yet Red Hat calls this “freeloading”. Yet that is PRECISELY what Free Software is about!
Rocky Linux, Alma Linux etc were well within their rights to rebrand and redistribute RHEL bug for bug to others. Red Hat had no right to shut them out. Yes they could have made them a customer and charged them for it, but they didn’t do that. And if I’m not mistaken they made the binaries available, not the source code. Meaning that Rocky and Alma would need to spend weeks compiling the code before they could even make it ready for distribution.
Now, someone could become a client of Red Hat, get the code and then host it on a server for anyone to download. But I have a feeling Red Hat would drop them as soon as they found out.
Basically RH now have a closed source mentality.
As for Fedora, stop being so naive. Were you born yesterday? I’m an IT Pro and I can tell your if my company set up a working group full of full time employees to work on a “community” distro which then gets directly absorbed into it company and used in our enterprise products, that working group is to all intents and purposes a part of my company since I’m freaking paying their salaries, and they are working on my freaking product!
Agree 100%. And both are 100% Community. openSuse is privately owned and supported by a massive Community.
Debian is perfect for reliability (although opensuse is very reliable) who don’t need the latest and don’t like installing updates all the time. 100% Community based.
Two fantastic, shining examples of the power of Community supported software 💪
I would like to quote for you from Gnu.org, Richard Stallman’s organization that invented the idea of free software. Here he explains what that means. I’ll link to the full webpage below.
“Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.** If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license.** If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
The word “free” has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of “free software,” we’re talking about freedom, not price. (Think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, study and change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.”
I’m not saying it will be banned, you can still use it but I’m calling the community to return to community distros like Debian who are 100% libre and user freedom respecting… Plus there many dedicated developers and other volunteers who support this out of love for FOSS and the principles of free computing for all.
That’s not childish. It’s a call to get back to our roots. Use Community distros, volunteer your time if you have the skills they need, make a money donation to thank them and help the project keep going. That’s how FOSS is supposed to work.
Well Red Hat put up a paywall so that only those who they choose, can get the code. That’s the issue. Then they justified it by calling users who want the code “free loaders”. That’s typical proprietary speak, it has no place in open source.
Ubuntu is downstream of Debian. But canonical have taken it, forced snaps on users, forced opt out telemetry in users and removed default flatpak support. All very user hostile moves.
Hence I’m calling the community to show these corps we don’t need them and community distros have everything we need while protecting user freedom.
Beta testing is great. Just not when it’s for Red Hat(Fedora), Canonical, Microsoft (WSL) or any other Greedy Corp. when they are requesting this in the spirit of open source.