[plug] Lindows download mirror

[Chris Caston]

On Thu, 2003-05-22 at 23:00, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 10:48:35PM +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> 
> | I was just searching for a Lindows mirror and could not seem to find
> | any. Any word on if LindowsOS also includes proprietary parts like
> | Xandros or if there any other reason why people aren't sharing it (other
> | than of course that Debian is much nicer)
> 
> I am under the impression that there is no way to obtain any of Lindows
> without paying for it.  Most of the individual programs are, of course,
> GPL'ed, but Lindows as a whole is not available without its proprietary
> bits, which are in turn AFAIK not available without paying for them.
> AIUI even downloading the source to the GPLed bits from the Lindows web
> site is only possible if you are a paying customer.
> 
> All of this is completely legal within the GPL and most other "free"
> licenses, but is most certainly against the spirit of the thing; and, of
> course, while there is nothing to stop anyone from sharing any of the
> GPL'ed bits of Lindows, there is little point in doing so as the
> interesting bits are all widely available from other sources.
> 
> Cameron.
> 
> 

Yes. It may be interesting to see how their business model works out. I
doubt they will every be popular with developers though.

Certainly this approach does stop people from being able to evaluate it
and their "builder" program in my opinion is a complete rip-off unless
you are able to do extremely high volume which you won't be able to do
if your selling Lindows.

Their $USD prices also make it more expensive than an OEM copy of XP
home so there's not point if your building and trying to keep prices
down.

Just another reason to put effort into building a carefully setup Debian
system instead.

regards,

Chris