So, DistroWatch replied to my moral rant about their policies towards Elive.
Thanatermesis has never asked DistroWatch not to post direct download links to the stable Elive CD images. I am in regular contact with the Elive developer and I’ve just checked all his recent emails (just to be sure), but I couldn’t find a single one (let alone “numerous requests”) where he would ask me not to post these links. So either he is lying to Mr Holwerda, or Mr Holwerda is lying in his blog.
Those are Thanatermesis’ words - “many times”, he wrote.
In six years of its existence, DistroWatch has never hosted any ISO images of any distribution, including Elive. Again, somebody is making things up.
Again, Thanatermesis’ words. I am assuming that “he uploaded it himself” does not necessarily have to mean to distrowatch.com/pub/incoming/, but any server.
Is it disrespectful of DistroWatch to provide direct download links to the Elive CD images? Yes, absolutely - and I agree with Mr Holwerda on this point. However, I don’t believe it is any more disrespectful than twisting the meaning of the word “donation” or providing non-existent links to a slow download server which, oops, is down and has been down for weeks. I have no problem with the Elive developer wanting to make money out of his hard work, but then he should be straightforward about it and go commercial, instead of playing these ridiculous “you must donate” and “feel guilty if I starve to death” games. Or he should come up with a better way of distributing his work than “hiding” it in randomly named “dot” directories on public FTP servers.
Look, I don’t agree with such a compulsory donation scheme either, and I would much rather see a voluntary donation scheme, but that is not a sound reason to be disrespectful and discourteous to another developer’s choice. It’s his god-given right to supply his users with his software in a way he deems necessary. You may not like that, but that is no reason to disrespect a developer who works really hard on his project in his free time, and post links to his work on fast servers - despite the fact that you are not legally prohibited to do so.
since Mr Holwerda portrays DistroWatch as a backstabbing organisation with little respect for other people’s work…
That’s a bit drama queenish of you. I am just saying that what you are doing with Elive is an ungentlemanlike thing to do, and I just pointed it out to you. You could have just added a “my take” or whatever to the newsitem, stating that you find it unacceptable of Thanatermesis to uphold such a donation scheme.
…while picturing OSNews as a moral-high-ground holding bastion of purity and innocence, here is a question to the author of the blog post: DistroWatch has donated close to US$14,000 to open source software projects over the last three years. How about OSNews, Mr Holwerda?
As a proper journalistic outlet [1], OSNews does not take sides by donating money to anything. We are an independent news outlet, and as such, we do not take donations, nor give them to anyone. We want to maintain our unbiasedness, and donations (either to or from OSNews) do not fit into that. So, even if we did give/receive donations, we would not talk about it.
Personally, I am not the type to scream my personal donations off the rooftops. I contribute to my free software project of choice in the best way I can, and on top of that, do the community a service by working hours and hours a day, unpaid (I don’t get a penny for my work on OSNews), on a website that provides that community with publicity. My donation habits are strictly personal, and not anyone’s business.
Apart from that, even if you donated tenhundredmillionbillion Dollars to the free software world, that does not give you the right to disrespect individual developers. No matter how many lives a doctor has saved, it does not give him the moral right to kill someone.
Morality is not for sale, Distrowatch.
[1] OSNews is a voluntary effort, and our editors and webmaster do not get paid in any way for the work we do. In other words, the word “proper” in this context is relative. I’m honest in that.