3 ms·
It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software has
by rlpb 12y ago
It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software has a huge cost", but there's no mention of the money they're collecting going to the developers of Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams that surely together comprise the majority of the work that they're referring to.
Basing their wording on the huge development cost of the entire work, rather than what they're adding, seems misleading to me since what they're adding is a tiny proportion of the entire cost they're referring to; yet they seem to want to take the money as justified by the entire cost.
That's not to say that Elementary OS developers aren't adding value. Clearly they are if users are downloading from them, and it's fine to ask users to pay for that.
- colechristensen 12y agoConsider also, quite importantly, that a large volume of the work done on any Linux-based operating system is and has been done entirely without money changing hands.
- pjmlp 12y agoOnly when one forgets that most of those developers: - were payed to work on GNU/Linux by their employers - had a different source of income - were students with their parents paying for their bills - were building a portfolio for a job change So money did change hands, even if indirectly.
- zxcvcxz 12y agoYou're being pedantic. The users point is that neither the Linux foundation, Linux Users, or Linus Torvalds pays people to contribute to the kernel. While one company may pay its employees to write code for the Linux kernel, that company is still writing the code and contributing it to Linux for free.
- pjmlp 12y agoThe employees salary is not free, or are you suggesting those employees don't enter the hours into the companies accounting system?