ITWire

But then Gould apparently doesn't know what benefit Red Hat derives from Fedora. Has he ever considered why Novell would run a project like OpenSUSE? Same rationale, sir.

Wait, there's more. Gould then claims that because Canonical, the company that sponsors Ubuntu, is offering for sale a proprietary tool called Landscape to manage Ubuntu servers, this makes Ubuntu less than kosher when it comes to open source.

What's wrong with that? Landscape works as an online service, same as Red Hat does with its Red Hat Network. I really fail to understand what point this man is trying to make.

Finally in the last paragraph of his story, Gould writes: "But no matter. Canonical and Ubuntu have the right to choose whatever business model they please. What's comical though is the blatant, almost Orwellian contradiction between their hard-nosed desire to make money and the grandiose Ubuntu philosophy: 'Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees'."

Looks like Gould is uncomfortable with Canonical making money. Hard-nosed desire? What should they have then - a soft-nosed desire?

Mr Gould, food costs - and costs a pretty penny these days. So do clothes. And shelter too. This isn't some hippie movement, the guys give something and get something in return. It's a fundamental law of nature. Developers need to eat and drink in order to code - and these open source coders provide excellent software, far better than some of the offerings from proprietary companies.

Even the good book, Mr Gould, does not say that money is the root of all evil. It's the love of money that fits this description. Words are little things but, boy, they can make a hell of a difference when they are either left out or misunderstood.