[Siyo]

If that's your argument, then why do we allow thousands of companies to base their proprietary web applications on the FOSS stack? How many of these companies would even exist today without Linux or Ruby or MySQL/Postgres? How much do companies contribute back to these projects? Why is it so bad if elementary OS is based on Debian, but it's completely fine when some startup runs on Debian servers?

[krisgenre]

Not everyone goes around calling people who download free software for free as cheaters. All this backlash is because of the attitude they are showing towards non paying customers.

[fernandotakai]

exactly. you don't see redhat calling everyone that uses centos cheaters -- hell, centos is part of redhat (even though it's independent).

[psgbg]

Sorry Red Hat killed Red Hat for end users (in favor of maintaining Red Hat for enterprise users)... And only in recent years admitted it was an error.

So you did chose bad your example. Cent OS was an answer to that, providing a Red Hat binary distribution without any support, for free.

[Siyo]

What they said is that they want to sell elementary OS. But going completely in that direction is pointless because someone will just fork the project and offer it for free. So what they did is make you enter $0, so when you do get it for free, it feels like you've cheated the system.

What's wrong with that?

[krisgenre]

Let's say everyone starts donating and they receive tons of money. Canonical, Debian and everyone else notices this and starts bitching about how eOS guys cheated the system by earning money off their work but din't pay anything back. Would this still seem right?

[forgotpasswd3x]

Unless I'm mistaken, they didn't call people who download free software for free cheaters.