Re: flexfax: Hylafax rpm issues

[David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>]

> 
> Freeware that demands top of the line modems is not freeware.

This smacks of "looking the gift horse in the mouth".

The term "free lunch" also comes to mind in this debate.  To some extent,
people like Red Hat are making money out of other people's free software.
I'm not sure what payment in kind they make to compensate, but it
is very difficult for commercial organisations to justify paying for
free material whether in kind or otherwise, when the accountants and
shareholders start to look.

One of the things that commercial software providers sell is support (even
though many seem to try and delegate it to their distributors).  Many use
freeware (e.g. SCO use sendmail, and other Berekely software) as the basis
of their products.  In fact, support is one of the major costs to commercial
software sellers.

Traditional freeware users, on Unix, have been people who could support
themselves, and are as likely to contribute patches to fix problems as to
ask for help in fixing them.

On the other hand, a lot of Linux users are from a plug and play mentality,
and Red Hat are exploiting this, by making it easier and easier to install
Linux without having enough knowledge to maintain it.  As a result, Red Hat,
etc. get the benefits, but people on the traditional support groups start
getting large numbers of really basic questions that someone who is using
the software ought to be able to answer themselves before they consider 
usinng anything except a commercially supported package.

Although I use Linux myself, I see a significant trend towards very low
quality questions being asked by Linux users, which, in my view are the
moral responsibility of the Linux packager, not of the original freeware
author.

Generally, the price of freeware is in the cost of supporting it yourself
and the price of cheap modems, as well as reliability issues, is in having
to spend time working round problems or money paying others to do so.