I'm really curious what you guys think abot the free software foundation and the mentality of the free (libre) software. If you agree why? If you don't, why not?

I'm completely behind it.
Free software is reviewed by a lot more people.
If something goes wrong the entire community has the possibility to work on a solution.

I don't like the idea of closed source systems. They hide their issues instead of solving them, and that often results in unsafe situations.

I'm not opposed to closed sourced software (I write it for a living) however I always choose open sourced alternatives if they exist and are at least close to competitive with the closed source 'version'

If anyone wants to work for free in their spare time and let me use their software without paying, I'm all for it. In some cases, like GIMP, the software sucks massively, but nobody forces me to use GIMP.

Personally though, I'll only work for free the day the plummer fixes my pipes for free and Intel makes me a CPU for free.

@Grumpy Free software is not free as a free beer but free as in freedom. You can buy free programs, or you can use them without price and donate some money to the programmers. Free programs are free cos if you use them, you have the 4 essential freedom. Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. Freedom 3: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. ( Source: https://gnu.org/philosophy/... )

@zaturek I'm a developer. I know about licenses. :-)

@Grumpy Ok, but than I don't get it,how the prices came in.

@zaturek Because "libre" software is also free as in beer. Sure, you can charge for it like Redhat, but due to the GPL, anyone with access to Redhat software can redistribute it for nothing, which is basically what CentOS does.

So, it's nice people to work for free in their spare time, but I've got bills to pay, so I'm not one of them.

@Grumpy ok, got it and I partly understand it. But nobody asked nobody to work for free. I mean even the fsf pays an acceptable salary to their programmers. Why anyone else wouldn't? When I statisfied with the operating system I use I pay them a price I can. No, it isn't that much I suppose to pay for a windows licence. But I strongly belive in free software. If I would make my money as a programmer, I would defenetly pay to debian each year, cos I want to support them cos I like what they do and I would use their system daily and their work helps me to pay my bills. I would have a fix precentage of my yearly budget to support theese kind of programs. Thats my opinion. I would rather pay 100$ yearly for ten years to use debian than pay whatever amount for windows once. Sorry, but I don't like the way things work. I would defenetly do it on another way.