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This phrase refers to stuff free as in free beer.
by dethstar 12y ago
This phrase refers to stuff free as in free beer.
- ceejayoz 12y agoAnd Whisper Systems, TOR, tox are free as in free beer. What's your point?
- explorigin 12y agoProbably a better disambiguation would be "services" that are free. Open-source projects can always be validated to make sure that they are not monetizing their user-base. Tor is a service but by reading the source code, you can see (if you understand the code) that nothing monetizable leaves your computer. I don't have as much confidence in Tox just because it hasn't been around as long (and I haven't read the source).
- icebraining 12y agoWikipedia is a service.
- jdiez17 12y agoWikipedia is a service puts up a huge banner every year asking you to please give them money if you don't want them to be forced to show advertisements, implicitly making you the product.
- icebraining 12y agoI say, the lengths people go to justify a trite thought-terminating cliché don't fail to astonish me. If the mere possibility than a service you use might in the future have ads is sufficient to justify the phrase "you are the product", then I don't see how anything can be an exception to that. After all, the next release of Tor might have ads! Who knows?
- teamhappy 12y agoTOR isn't free. The support and development is paid for by donations and funding, the bandwidth (currently over 12000 MiB/s) is paid for by lot's of volunteers. I get your point though. The question isn't whether something is free to use, it's who's paying for incurring costs.