Have you heard of elivecd? This has nothing to do with helpdesk software (it's a distribution of Debian+E17), but this was the first open source project that I

Have you heard of elivecd? This has nothing to do with helpdesk software (it's a distribution of Debian+E17), but this was the first open source project that I ever saw that successfully got me to pull out my (paypal) wallet and fork over, similar to what you're describing. The distribution comes in the form of a livecd which you can install "only with the help of the installer module" which I have not seen in any repository, but everything else is certainly open source. Historically the dev images have always come with free installer modules. Of course being a livecd, you are free to use it without installing as long as you don't mind losing everything you've done each time you reboot. It may have also been the first livecd to enable a copy-on-write union filesystem (ram or on a USB stick) so that you could write into your home directory or really anywhere at all on the filesystem (apt-get install) without modifying the system image. Thanatermesis only charged for the installer modules for stable releases, which to my knowledge started at 2.0 (debian lenny) and was supposed to get a new release for wheezy. But again, to my knowledge, no installer modules have been distributed for the new beta; they have spent more cycles on the new version of the website (which is finally looking mighty good today!) http://www.elivecd.org http://www.elivecd.org