No More Free Beer? [LWN.net]

October 22, 2003

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

It is no secret that many commercial Linux companies are struggling to survive in a market often dominated by the perception that Linux is free. Much of the blame can of course be attributed to the unfortunate use of "free" in English, which, unlike most other languages, makes no distinction between the two common meanings of the word - free as in speech and free as in beer. Fighting off this perception is not easy and many Linux distributions are trying hard to find new ways to throttle the the free beer tap or to restrict access to it.

MandrakeSoft released its latest Mandrake Linux, version 9.2, last week. It was the first time in the company's 5-year history that the final product was withheld until the box sets are ready for shipment. Only those who had joined MandrakeClub were given a privileged access to the three ISO images - via the BitTorrent file sharing technology. Not every member was happy about it - those on a dial-up connection or some of those behind firewalls find themselves excluded from the party. But while public FTP servers will only carry the ISO images at the end of this month, MandrakeSoft has made the entire 9.2 directory tree available for those wishing to upgrade an existing installation directly from FTP servers.

Like Mandrake, Lycoris also restricted the public availability of their recently released Desktop/LX Update 3. According to notes on the distribution's mirrors, the ISO images will only be uploaded in November, more than 2 months after the official release. However, the online system upgrade has not been restricted, so anybody who previously installed an older beta release can perform a simple but unsupported upgrade to the latest stable version.

SuSE has always tried hard to convince users about the value of their boxed sets. Firstly, the product's best-known utility (YaST) comes with a somewhat hard-to-interpret, non-GPL license, which prevents users from distributing the ISO images. Secondly, SUSE does not provide ISO images as a matter of company policy, with the exception of some products made for less widely used architectures. Even beta testing is closed to public. However, SuSE does supply a means to install the distribution directly from FTP servers, usually about 1 - 2 months after the official release.

Many other commercial distributions have much more restrictive policies. The latest releases from Libranet, Lindows.com and Xandros are only available from their respective online stores. Of the three, only Libranet provides any form of free download - that of an outdated and stripped-down edition. It is interesting to note that cheap illegal copies of LindowsOS and Xandros have reportedly been spotted on the streets of Thailand and other Asian countries, right next to pirated Microsoft products.

Although Linux distributions seem increasingly inclined to restrict, or at least delay, the free availability of their products, all is not bad news. Slackware still provides complete and unrestricted access to their product immediately after release; in fact of the major and well-established commercial distributions, Slackware is the only one with such a policy. This is largely due to the fact that Slackware is a small (2-person) company with minimal development costs and a relatively large and loyal user base.

Then there is Red Hat. Always innovative and always different from the rest, Red Hat has decided to buck the trend and turn their distribution over to the Fedora community for further development. The Fedora Project has yet to establish itself and there are some rough bumps on the transition road (Fedora 0.95 ISOs were released without the usually meticulous release notes!), but freeing the distribution from its commercial shackles will almost certainly result in a better and more user-oriented product.

Of course, Linux is about choice and those unable to accept any form of commercialization or restrictions on availability from a Linux distribution can always turn to non-commercial Debian, Gentoo or any of the dozens of smaller projects for all their needs. If in doubt, talk to the wise or the penniless to find out which of the pubs still serve free beer...

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No More Free Beer?

Posted Oct 23, 2003 2:31 UTC (Thu) by gduval (guest, #11868) [Link]

Like the author said below, Mandrake 9.2 ISO images were provided in advance to Mandrake Linux Club Members and all 9.2 contributors (developers, translators...), but they will be released publicly before the end of October, when Mandrake 9.2 products will be available in retail.

As for Bittorrent, it was a first large scale experiment and there were a few glitches, but all of them have been fixed, and solutions were reported through a FAQ.

Simultaneously, the entire Mandrake 9.2 FTP tree, including full sources and contribs, was released publicly.

Mandrake Linux has been the first Linux distribution to release ISO images, and was soon followed by other distributions. We will continue to do it, so no need to worry for free beer! At the same time, all users can easily understand that increasing the number of Mandrake Club Subscribers and Mandrake products purchasers generates more revenues, and in the end this benefits to all (better and more featured product).

GD.

What Fedora community?

Posted Oct 23, 2003 4:40 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

"The Fedora community" apparently does not exist. That is, everyone on the Fedora steering committee, plus all the key Fedora developers, are Red Hat employees. The architectural decisions are all being made by Red Hat engineers. The only difference appears to be that Fedora will not be sold in stores as "Red Hat 10", and its status is being talked down by Red Hat marketing to encourage business users to spring for Advanced Workstation 3.0 instead. The previous Fedora project appears to have been assimilated.

Now, I'm not necessarily against this, other than my concerns about how it is being communicated. I respect the Red Hat crew's technical skills very much.

It is possible that this will change in the future and that Red Hat will allow others to help make the decisions. But I see no reason why users with limited budgets shouldn't treat Fedora, when it ships, as if it were Red Hat 10.

Piracy in Asia

Posted Oct 23, 2003 14:28 UTC (Thu) by kay (subscriber, #1362) [Link]

The GPL say you can redistribute the GPL Software, but not design, trademarks and value added comercial software of the comercial distributions.

So they do "the right thing".

Kay

Piracy in Asia

Posted Oct 24, 2003 9:17 UTC (Fri) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link]

I'm not sure, I don't think Redhat had started to get picky at that stage, people like cheapbytes were still happily distributing RH I think.

Either way, the police were not on a trademark/artwork infringement raid.

For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 23, 2003 18:20 UTC (Thu) by ssavitzky (guest, #2855) [Link]

Since 7.3, RedHat has been steadily dropping programs that I use. First it was ical (a nice little calendar program) and frm; they've finally gotten to the point where they're dropping xtoolwait (the excuse in the package list is, if I remember correctly, "no longer used in distribution"). Since when does that have anything to do with what users need?

Add the pain of using RedHat Network to keep up to date, and the deficiencies of the apt port for RPMs compared to the Debian original, and it's no wonder I'm joining the growing ranks of those switching to Debian-based distributions. Sure, it's a little painful, but at this point it's actually less pain to go from RH7.3 to Woody than it is from 7.3 to 9.

For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 23, 2003 20:42 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

Since 7.3? How about since 6.0... My first exposure to their "practice" was when they dropped xface support from xemacs because they said the xface library had too many security problems.

And I would be happy to buy and use Enterprise WS for $179, but it lacks dhcp and bind, which will cost you an additional $170 to get them in ES. Want CDs and printed documentation, but not Support? Forget it. Red Hat won't sell them separately. It would seem that they want to get out of the printing business pretty badly.

I was buying each Professional release on it's twice a year release schedule to get CD's and printed docs. And I've been paying the $60 per year RHN basic update fee for each of my systems. For my three systems, that came to almost $550/year. Three Enterprise ES Basic's are going to cost me $1050 per year and I can't even get CD's or printed docs with that! It's hard not to imagine that Enterprise customers are completely subsidizing Fedora users, provided Red Hat can convince former RHL customers (like me) that their Enterprise product is still a value at twice the price and none of the extras...

For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 30, 2003 18:12 UTC (Thu) by wmshub (guest, #3995) [Link]

I'm also planning on leaving red hat. Not because of the missing software packages, but it just seems they want too much money for too little. I have three systems on RHN, and I've been happily paying the $60 per year for each of them to get the security patches. Now I have to either switch to fedora, keep my money, but do a full upgrade every few months, or else pay $400 per year for my DNS server and $170 per year for my workstations. God forbid I ever am bold enough to buy a 4-cpu system, then my costs become truly astronomical. Sorry, but this kind of price increase for no additional benefits just doesn't sit well with me. I haven't decided yet which distribution I am switching to, but as soon as my RHN updates stop coming, I will switch to a disctribution is willing to accept $60 per year for timely security patches. Debian looks like a good choice, but I'll look at the prices of SUSE and maybe Mandrake as well.

Trolls writing articles?

Posted Oct 23, 2003 20:56 UTC (Thu) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

I get the distinct feeling that recent articles by Ladislav are either maliciously discriminating against Mandrake Linux, or are simply trolling (such as ZDNet and friends do, hoping to gain readership by posting controversial articles).

I paid my membership fees to LWN to get LWN-style content, not rehashes of Distrowatch's biased (against Mandrake by the slant of most articles) opinion. If I wanted to get more of these articles, I would support Distrowatch.com, but now you're making me wonder if I should rather support a less biased news site ...

Mandrakesoft was looking to provide a service to the MandrakeClub members, as well as not shooting their boxed sales in the foot. Bittorrent is an ingenious solution to this problem (and I don't see anyone noting that ...). Sure, there have been teething problems, but over 10TB of data was served in under a week (please, go and budget for distributing that amount of data via private FTP and tell me what it comes to before you criticise them).

Also, the article states: "Of course, Linux is about choice and those unable to accept any form of commercialization or restrictions on availability from a Linux distribution can always turn to non-commercial Debian, Gentoo or any of the dozens of smaller projects for all their needs."

I have two questions on this:

1)Why is Gentoo classed as "non-commercial" when Mandrake isn't? Mandrake is just as open, and the entire distribution was released freely on the FTP mirrors at the same time the ISOs were made available to the Club members. Mandrake sells boxes and pressed CDs of their product, as does Gentoo!

Sure, there is a price difference, but the 2-CD Discovery Pack includes a printed manual for the difference, but a price difference doesn't make a competing distro "Free-beer", only "cheaper".

2)How many full-time developers does Debian fund working on KDE and GNOME and other projects (yes, funding distributions by buying product is a good way to support development!)?

Then, it seems that Ladislav is not aware that Mandrake already has a development community:

"Then there is Red Hat. Always innovative and always different from the rest, Red Hat has decided to buck the trend and turn their distribution over to the Fedora community for further development."

I find it hard to believe the "innovative" bit, since it seems more like Redhat is playing follow-the-leader. Mandrake already has heavy community involvement, with a number of packages in the main distribution being maintained by non-employee contributors. I don't see the need for LWN to do marketing spin for Redhat.

Maybe it's just me, but I haven't seen a positive article from Ladislav (except maybe the package management shoot-out which wasn't entirely fair ;-)).

BTW, I am "on a dial-up connection" (28.8k to be exact), and have club membership, but I am not "unhappy". I will get my pre-ordered CDs quite soon, but I believe that offering the ISOs to Club members (I got mine for free being a contributor) is a good idea, and adds value to the Club.

Please, give me a reason why I shouldn't rather be supporting Mandrakesoft than these trollish articles (considering LWN subscription and MandrakeClub membership fees are almost identical). Or maybe Ladislav wants to write an article on why LWN is no longer "Free-beer"? You restrict content to subscribers for a certain time, what gives you the right to criticise others who do it? Should I suggest readers should go elsewhere for their content (and not /., since they also give preferential treatment to paying customers)?

Trolls writing articles?

Posted Oct 23, 2003 21:12 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

I actually think that people aren't aware that mandrake gets quite a bit of help from a small community, based on the cooker tree. I only know it's there because I do the occacional patch,bug report or news post.

Maybe mandrake doesn't have the same marketing punch as redhat seems to have.

Trolls writing articles?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 0:43 UTC (Fri) by qubes (subscriber, #2562) [Link]

I think you've just read too much into the article. Yes, Mandrake is a very nice distrobution for the desktop, but then Mandrake isn't trying to sell into the server market ( their US markiting stinks...I know that they have a server install, and that every linux install can be shoe-horned into a server roll.) I guess it all boils down to what you expect for your dollar; RedHat wants the "big money", Mandrake wants large numbers of desktop users. Both get there given enough satisfied paying users.

That said, I would like to think that every _major_ release used a bittorrent type release as well. I've found, that for popular files, bittorrent works wonders. I've taken to searching for .torrent links in /. posts just to take a load off of the public ftp servers.

Thomas

Trolls writing comments?

Posted Nov 3, 2003 23:54 UTC (Mon) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Sorry,

but gentoo is free*, mandrake not. Gentoo releases cd-images asap to everyone free of charge, and you don't have to buy those iso's from them, just ask anyone with decent connection and cd-burner... And, you buy/dl the cd once in your lifetime and use the network update the rest of the time.
That's just facts. Where in the article does the author say: "Hey, screw mandrake?"

Your reaction to this article is somewhat strange. I don't think that you'll further the sympathy for mandrake by posting such comments. :-|

* beer

No More Free Beer?

Posted Oct 24, 2003 21:02 UTC (Fri) by garloff (subscriber, #319) [Link]

Apropos SuSE's YaST license: It is not true that the YaST license prevents users from copying ISOs. From the YaST license, it's perfectly legal to do that.
However, you may not sell the result for money or include it in a product you sell for money without prior permission from SuSE.
The YaST license is not meant to prevent private copying; it is designed to prevent other companies that do not invest effort into improving Linux from taking the SuSE work and getting the profit.
This is against the spirit of FSF's GNU GPL, which allows whoever wants to make a profit to do so. That's why the YaST license is often bashed by the GPL fans.

However, I fail to understand why it's so often misunderstood.

No More Free Beer?

Posted Oct 30, 2003 18:30 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gosh. It's all about freedom. Not abstract but very real freedom.

The main thing is simple promise: "when you are dissatisfied with service you can fork the project". GPL, BSD and other licenses have such promise.

GPL has one additional promise: "when we have two different forks made by any party we can be assured in legality of merge". BSD does not have such promise and it caused real problems in the past (of course GPL guarantee makes some pother problems for some companies - think TSG).

With YaST you can not "go you own way" when you want to - think about Microsoft's MS IE. Yes, it permits redistribution. But not in commercial way. And this really means you still are tied to SuSE forever. I do not like it. Remember gcc/egcs debacle ? SuSE made it very clear thay do not like such scenario. And that's enough for me.

Oh, I'm sure that's now what SuSE had in mind when license was witten. But... do you remember good, friendly company named "Caldera" who donated Alan Cox SMP system to add SMP support in Linux? Do you? I have a news for you: this is the same company who now tries to make Linux proprietary and if not then destroy it. When you are dealing with companies the only thing you can trust is paper with signed contract on it. Opinions of CEO of CTO only matter as conduit to get some words on paper signed - nothing more, nothing less.

I respect SuSE engineers and SuSE's extensions to kernel and other programs sometimes are very good.

But shen we discuss what distro to use SuSE is not even considered. Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, even FreeBSD and other *BSD systems. But not SuSE. You now know why.

No More Free Beer?

Posted Nov 4, 2003 0:00 UTC (Tue) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Yessir! That's what they mean with freedom of choice: tell them what to choose.

The 'ingredients' of the beer must remain free

Posted Nov 7, 2003 4:49 UTC (Fri) by rabnud (guest, #2839) [Link]

Well, yes, RedHat, etc. should charge for their binaries, certainly.

Why should the efforts of these corporations always be taken as only 'not
for profit'? These companies support their binaries, that is an expense.
These companies tend to test their code a bit better than I could test
any code, they are much more aware of prior holes, etc. and they use that
knowledge in their new code - code Which they compile and distribute (now
for money) and also must release the source code for same. System
functions as designed, I'd say.

Personally, I thank them - they have contributed very much to Linux, but
we all need to remember that the source code is still required to be
freely available, so the tasks simply become installation from locally
compiled source code. Beyond my current skillset, certainly, but not out
of scope with GPL, and (in my personal case) this was fully anticipated.

As such, there will always be a Slackware or a Gentoo or a Debian, to
address the less financial user but if the big guys decide to keep their
modifications locked up from the little folks, I'll call it a GPL foul.