Thread: A Free software?

I am not a Linux user..and I would like to know if a newbie like me can easily understand (a friendly suer king of thing)it when I am going to use it as my new OS in my pc...I had heard that its a free software is it true? I mean not for sale commercially? compare to other Softwares?

Originally Posted by abena

I would like to know if a newbie like me can easily understand (a friendly suer king of thing)it when I am going to use it as my new OS in my pc...I had heard that its a free software is it true

Yes it is free though there are commercial distros available with support, You can go through Linux - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia first and understand. Current distros are very user friendly and most of them have GUI based installation. Also most of them come with live CD so that you can test them without actually installing in your system. Most live CD version have limited software as enough space is not available, you have to download other software later.

I use Mandriva 2010.0 free x86 64 at home and 2009.1 free x86 64 at office as all the devlopment tools such as java, c, c++, qt, php,etc are readily available also GUI based IDE also available.

I had heard that its a free software is it true? I mean not for sale commercially? compare to other Softwares?

One of the misunderstood concept of FOSS is the price but when you go thru the GPL license you will realise that they are talking about freedom and freedom for them is

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price

They just want you to release the source code with all the needed attribute(s) and all. I haven't read the whole of GPL license but presume that you can sell your application along with the source code. It's that simple. If atall you are reluctant to release the whole src code then checkout the LGPL