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Wind River To Stop Selling BSD/OS
David writes "According to an article on Bsdnewsletter.com, OS company Wind River has said it will be stopping sales of BSD/OS on this December 31st, and product support exactly one year thereafter. Only 15 more weeks to grab the final 5.1 update before this piece of history might be gone forever..."
BSDi was NEVER a free (speech or beer) product, and as such really has and had no impact on the free software community. So, while another (some might say 'useless') proprietary software company goes down the shithole, it does not affect the free software movement in any signifigant way.
Free and Net BSD will continue to serve our community alongside of Linux as always, completely unaffected by today's announcement.
Why should I pay for something I can download for free?
(Sorry to respond to this troll but I feel I must)
You shouldn't -- if you want the program you're using to die, that is. Volunteer OSS projects needs funding; after all, people have to eat and pay the bills you know! Everyone who wants OSS to suceed to should, as often as is possible, either buy physical items (like cdrom's manuals and the like) or donate money to keep the project(s) alive. It's in your best interest if you use the software, and it's also fair to the authors. An exception to this would be if a project is already well-funded (quite rare) for instance if IBM was paying every kernel hacker a decent salary to work on the kernel.
Voluntary donations drive so many of our most precious social services, like charities, public television and radio, and Free Software. Hopefully in the future it will drive artists to produce music. I've always wanted a p2p program that would have a button on the side when you're downloading a song that says "click here to give $1 to the artist.".. but that's going a little off-topic.