this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Dude, I remember a time where buying your distro was the default behavior. There's nothing shady about it.
I've never bought a distro. I've paid someone for the CD and shipping, way back before ISOs and internet speeds at home made downloading it practical. But never have I "bought" for Linux. Every CD I got I could legally copy and give away; or charge for the service.
With few exceptions, what you were paying for the media, the effort of burning and shipping, and shipping. Even with companies like Redhat, what you paid for with Enterprise was service and support, not the software.
I seem to be having this argument frequently lately. Taking someone else's work, that they gave you for free, putting your own logo on it and then selling it to people is one of the most unethical things that isn't illegal that I can think of. Selling support services is entirely fair. Selling compute, bandwidth, and space, entirely ethical. But profiting off other's generosity? How do you justify that? Even if you're not a socialist or communist, taking a painting someone gave away and then turning around and selling it is disgusting and amoral. You've added no value; you're purely profiting on someone else's work.
Packaging the software in a distro with an installer and a custom DE adds a lot of value.
I'm not familiar with Zorin specifically, but freely distributing source code and charging for binaries was one of the earliest monetization strategies for GPL code.
Yeah... for the authors. That's fine. You downloading my FOSS, packaging it and selling it is slimy carpet-baggery.
Yet, when Microsoft, Apple and every other proprietary software house do it with permissively licensed code, I don't see anybody complaining.
The declaration of intent by the author is the license. If they don't want commercial redistribution of their work, do like Futo. Otherwise we'll all start taking crazy pills and demand people adhere to an imagined restriction that isn't written anywhere.
That's the thing with ethics: they aren't generally written anywhere. That's where being a decent human being comes in.
Doing exactly what an author intended with their work is very ethical indeed.
I bought SUSE Linux once upon a time. It was a physical CD and the packaging that I paid for. Maybe a little support was bundled, probably not. That was a time when the internet was slow for most and not an option for others, wifi wasn't ubiquitous (and if it existed, good luck getting the proper drivers loaded without internet), live distributions weren't really a thing yet, booting from usb was finicky and unreliable, and the install CDs would have the entire OS and basically all the software you could want to install bundled. These would have been the days before the fall of Napster and the rise in other "Linux ISO sharing tools". Ubuntu would even mail you like a half dozen physical CDs and some stickers just for asking and promising to share them in your community.
There's nothing wrong with buying the physical things or paying for support. That's not what this meme is showing though.
I was discussing this, not the meme.