Zorin Linux Is Heavy on the Windows Dressing

More blather on how zorin is so great... I don't buy it. Seems to me that this is yet another Baboontu wannabe distro to finally replace M$ Losedoze. Oh, and Zorin also "seems to violate the intent of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) principles" by its "charging for a premium release with more extensive features" Yuckie yuck! (but at least it doesn't have LUnity)

2c

As long as they supply the relevant source code for the "more extensive features" to their customers along with the "premium release" binaries, they should be perfectly OK, GPL-wise.

If the "more extensive features" are actually proprietary, it's a little trickier, but still entirely possible -- and sometimes even wins some praise (for example, didn't LibraNet win many fans, for their Debian-compatible distro with some proprietary install/set-up/admin tools?)

Yast was closed source for years, and I don't recall folks complaining that much about SuSE.

I never get why people feel that charging for FOSS software is somehow against the spirit of FOSS. As long as the source code is made available then it is fine by me.

I use Linux because it is better than Windows not because it is cheaper.

Quoting: ... As long as the source code is made available then it is fine by me.

It's also fine by the GPL too, and you are encouraged to charge as much as the market will bare, more if you don't expect to make a lot of sales.

I'm sure SUSE was a fine distribution back then, but there being no freely downloadable version effectively did stop me from ever trying it out. It's not really that I was loath to pay the money. It's just that there were so many freely downloadable distributions to look at, I was never motivated to pay the money. I kept figuring that I would try it sometime, but didn't get around to doing it.

I still haven't really given OpenSuse a go, just because I've become comfortable with deb based distributions, and haven't really used any RPM based one for a while. I keep meaning to take a look at Mageia (I used to love Linux Mandrake back in the day) and OpenSuse, but I just haven't gotten around to conducting the experiment. I went to download PCLinuxOS at one point, and found there was no 64 bit version (at least at that time), so I didn't bother. Our Linux servers at work are all Ubuntu and Slackware at the moment. I think the last RPM distro we had at work was a Red Hat 7 server (from before they dropped non-enterprise versions and spun off Fedora).