siamhie wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:40 am
They took MX-23.4 KDE and bundled extra software at a cost aka the Diamond Edition.
I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of charging for software, and I'm even willing to bend a little on charging for software in free and open source projects. Things like the grsec kernel hardening project would be something useful, and there's certainly a market for people who want enhanced security from their offerings, but I decline to pay for grsec patches because they never seem to get around to upstreaming any of their work to the mainline kernel. This makes them good at taking things and bad at giving things back, and if you want me to consider you not a terrible person, you need to figure out how to strike a balance between those two things.
If the iDealOS folks have an app or three that are just gobsmackingly good, I can see charging €59. And I can see bundling it with an OS for convenience much like how low-level disk repair or disk formatting tools are usually bundled into a little minimal version of a bootable FreeDOS ISO or something. I was happy to pay something like €60 every six months for new OpenBSD install discs I never used[0], because it was a project I'd used for years and it was a way to contribute back to those developers who helped build all my firewalls and mail servers.
I have no idea what the extra software is or why it might be worth €59, but that's for individual users to decide. Personally, I'm content staying amazed at how much the MX team has managed to accomplish building a project they provide at no cost. How can they do so much when they give away their software for free? Volume!
[0] I used the operating system, just not the discs.