Thread: Sketchup plans copyright

Originally Posted by Vernonv

Gotta love people who complain that there are "catches" to the free software they use. There is a simple fix ... pay for the software.

Seriously there are not many people out there willing to spend hours and hours creating something, just to give it away (without any catches), and really, why should they. I would love a new timber TV cabinet ... I wonder if I can get a freeware one for nothing?

I agree shame Bill Gates didn't when he raided old Bulletin Boards and scored much of whats now taken for granted in Microsofts OS & packages. The original writers diddled out of millions.

Then we have Free software such as used under LINUX and other OS.

Originally Posted by Vernonv

Gotta love people who complain that there are "catches" to the free software they use. There is a simple fix ... pay for the software.

Seriously there are not many people out there willing to spend hours and hours creating something, just to give it away (without any catches), and really, why should they. I would love a new timber TV cabinet ... I wonder if I can get a freeware one for nothing?

I totally agree with what you are saying but the thing that bugs me is the misleading way they promote the product as being free and in fact, is definitely not free.
If it is not a totally free program to download and use, then it should be stated in the promotion for the item that the software is not freeware.
Sometimes you can read a whole webpage on the product and it leads you to believe you are going to get this product totally free, until you get to the last paragraph where, for the first time, mentions the price you need to pay to buy the software.

Actually there are quite a few free program packages for download so I guess there are those out there who do sit down and write them.

Some of these free ones are really good. That's my two bobs worth anyway.

There's actually a whole software movement devoted to free software - and they mean free as in 'no charge' and free as in 'here's the source code, feel free to make it better'.

See Open-source software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And more than half the internet runs on free, open source software...so a few people write it!

Don't get me wrong, there certainly are people who write software and give it away for free (without any catch). But what I always find surprising is when people get upset that their free software has some sort of "catch" or is not fully functional like a "paid up" version. What do you really expect for nothing?

It's all well and good for people to write totally free software, but without paid for software, or freeware versions with limitations or catches (as a marketing tool to get you to pay), it would be unlikely that totally free software would even exist, as there would not be any software companies and all the programmers would be out looking for real jobs.

Originally Posted by Vernonv

Gotta love people who complain that there are "catches" to the free software they use. There is a simple fix ... pay for the software.

Seriously there are not many people out there willing to spend hours and hours creating something, just to give it away (without any catches), and really, why should they. I would love a new timber TV cabinet ... I wonder if I can get a freeware one for nothing?

Debian -- The Universal Operating System
openSUSE.org
plus numerous others.
For some definitions of free software, see what the Free Software Foundation and the Defence Free Software Guide have to say.

There are lots of people who spend a lot of time writing software which they then give away. Companies too, such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, the crowds at freebsd.org, netbsd.org and openbsd.org. Even some government departments such as NSA. And even Microsoft has contributed to the Linux kernel!

Most of the software I use has a free software licence, and if I wish, I can get the source code, read it, learn from it, change it as I wish and redistribute it. Those rights, and not the price/cost, are what a good many people mean when they talk of Free Software.

A good reason Google would require a no-charge irrevocable world-wide licence for sketchup plans is so that they can operate things such as the google sketchup warehouse. Without such permission, how could Google redistribute them?