Terrasoft appears to be taking order for YDL 4.0 now

[Eric Dunbar]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 14:21:48 -0600, Ryan Nix <rnix at prometheon.net> wrote:
> Thats like saying buy Windows XP to support further development of Windows.

Well, umm, well, umm. If you want to use the software and want to get
bug fixes/updates there has to be some incentive for a company to work
on it, doesn't there (especially if the company doesn't sell
hardware)? (though, the paradigm for OSS is somewhat different)

> Yellow Dog might gain better traction if they let people download it for
> free from a mirrored site.

They do allow people to d/l from a mirrored site, for free!

For the whole of $0 you get an OS that's not that far behind Mac OS X
in terms of capabilities, robustness, and, with every passing year,
user friendliness.

I'm amazed that they go to the effort to put together an ISO for
people to download _for free_. I think it'd be absolutely fair to
charge $10 or $20 to d/l the ISOs. Just because it's "Open Source"
doesn't mean that it has to be free!

> Its certainly worked for Redhat.

Fedora (the "home user" version) is no longer a money making
operation. It also has a _much_ larger user base than all of the Mac
distros of Linux put together. Judging by the fact that RedHat spun
off/eliminated the home version of RedHat (now an independent project
called Fedora) I'm guessing that there wasn't enough money in the
home/casual user side of things to justify devoting resources towards
making a "home" version.

I haven't used the other Linux distros on the Mac but I suspect
they're not quite as polished as YDL. It's nice to have a company do
the hard work of making Fedora run on the Mac.

There's one other bonus of having companies involved in the making of
distros -- if they're going to sell copies they need to make sure that
their distro works out of the box on a number of different types of
computers... and YDL does.

Eric.