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In Oct 2000, a regional tax office in Poland declared, and fined companies for tax evasion, that free software products are a gift, and thus users need to pay the gift tax, using "leading commercial products" as a basis for valuation. In that particular case, they valuated Linux based on Windows NT Server, and Star Office on Microsoft Office.

During appeals, the Ministry of Finance initially declined any explanations, then after a long time finally said that in this case no tax is due, yet any schemes of gratis distribution "need to be decided on a case by case basis".

Sources (in Polish): 1, 2.

Gazeta Wyborcza presents its own, twisted point of view. The real facts are at http://7thguard.net/ - there are pepole who had the will and determination to push polititians to some reaction. Unfortunately, at this moment, the relation of their fight is only in polish :( http://7thguard.net/news.php?id=4309

Gazeta Wyborcza presents its own, twisted point of view. The real facts are at http://7thguard.net/ - there are pepole who had the will and determination to push polititians to some reaction. Unfortunately, at this moment, the relation of their fight is only in polish :( http://7thguard.net/news.php?id=4309

There is also another reason for open source - Microsoft. Recently in Poland (sorry for the language) there was a campaign by Microsoft - companies that managed to release a software product within half a year that used ms server product(s) got MSDN for ridiculously low price (half or even lower). Then, when this companies got their products released, convinced their customers to use MS SQL, Windows on the server and stuff, guess what happened ?? MS started to offer competing software. These buissnesses were just to "pave" the way for MS software and infrastructure, so that is was cheaper and easier for MS to distribute their software! They were reportedly even so kind as to offer some of the naive buisnessmen to sell MS software instead of their own ;).

Now, could such a thing happen to Trolltech or MySQL ? There is something more important than fast money - independence and stability that stems from it!!!

Knoppix is excellent for data rescue and recovery work. This data recovery howto for Knoppix has proved invaluable for many of my friends. It has also been translated into Polish

thats right, duke nukem ##$@^@ 3D source code released under the GPL at www.3drealms.com you can download the source at http://7thguard.net/files/duke3dsource.zip and other mirrors listed at 3drealms web page. but hey, for whatever reason slashdot doesnt consider that newsworthy yet.