> thank you, that reinforces the idea that selling a "freeware" is how you harvest bad karma from your customers
Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.
But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.
Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.
Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.
And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.
Well, you should, because doing so generally requires exploitation of the ignorant or an outright scam.
But the additional value provided might be as simple as (pre)installing the OS and making sure it works with the hardware. Or transferring the customer's data from their old OS for them. I see nothing wrong with charging for those. I might not pay for them since I can easily do them myself but they can be valuable services to others.
Hypothetically you could also sell copies of a distro on physical media to somewhere with poor internet access and it would be fine. People did that in the 90's even in rich countries.
Of course it all sort of depends on how much you charge and for what. You probably still couldn't charge $100 just for the copy without some kind of exploitation since informed people would figure out cheaper ways of getting it.
And of course if you just took an existing distro, changed its name and branding to RolphOS without adding anything of value, and then sold ISO images for $100 to the ignorant by presenting it as your unique special OS, you would get a bad name in the community. It probably still wouldn't violate copyright if all the software were open source, you didn't claim copyright for anything you didn't write and you retained the original licenses, but it would be scammy.