On a sunny day (Tue, 22 May 2018 17:07:01 +0200) it happened Axel Berger
 wrote in :

>Jan Panteltje wrote:
>> With that reasoning / attitude there would not be Linux.
>
>Linux is noting to with being free as in beer.


The work I have put in over the years, countless hours, was for free
for those who use it.
YES it has EVERYTHING to do with free as in beer.

There are some companies that use it primarely to make money,
deliberately create incompatibilities in the kernel, in the compiler, Rathead
comes to mind.


>See:
>
>https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Yes, charging for distribution is OK, but IMNSHO only as long as you do not
create your own little incompatible version
just to keep market share.


Of course some do that anyways..
Distribution can be free too, as available on the net for download (many
distros),. kernel.org etc etc.



>Even if I know free software to exist, I may still prefer to pay if that
>makes it easier to find what I need and possibly easier to use. I use
>several commercial programs where I know there are sevweral free
>alternatives that give just as good results.

Over the years (started with SLS Linux in 1998) I wrote many applications,
some because there was no application for Linux that was as good as the MS
windows ones,
some because those simply did not exist at all.
This was especially true when digital TV came.
There is a whole lot of DTV related stuff on my site for download, both audio,
video and subtitles related.
Some of that code, from feedback I get, made it into other open source
projects.
There is exactly ONE program that I had running under wine (windows emulator)
in Linux, but on the later versions of wine
it crashed my Linux system, so now NO other application, everything is open
source.
I like programming, do find it a better way to spend time than watching TV, but
I do that too.
I did consider once to create a 'Panteltje Linux' but that is a life long
workload, moving target,
and 99% of the stuff does not interest me anyways, neither do I have the in
depth knowledge of all fields
(my background is electronics and broadcasting, and some).
I write what I need or want to try or test.
And it is free.
Make money of it in an unfair way, you will be sued.
hehe, some joker tried that some years ago, had a big website,
every time I announced a feature he was advertising it too.
Then I announced an other feature, so did he, but I never implemented it (was
for some group and was not needed)..
Gone that website, could not deliver.
:-)
Some things (not Linux related but open source) where used in China and they
really made nice things from it, I like that.

Better focus on programming, not on the business aspect.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05