Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cogman10 1956 days ago
Depends a lot on the free product.

For a linux distro, my expectations are that it's "free" but support will cost you money. My expectation is not that it's "free" and the OS will spy on you and report back to HQ so sales can make more sales.

If I don't give personal information on installation my expectation is the product is not harvesting or forwarding that information (For example, I expect that with Facebook, I don't expect that with GIMP).

Both are certainly wrong IMO. MS for giving personal info to a 3rd party and Canonical for bundling spyware with their OS. Both are super icky.
2 comments
pabs3 1955 days ago
That depends on the distro, a lot of distros offer gratis support. Some like Debian have both paid and gratis support.

https://www.debian.org/support

link
sudosysgen 1956 days ago
Well, in the case it's not from the OS, but purely from Azure.

And you're selling the information in order to get tech support from Canonical, otherwise you can get it without selling your info (but won't really receive tech support).

link