Parted Magic Is Still Free

[schmidtbag]

I hope the ISO image gets put on SourceForge too.

I'm pretty sure it was, but I'm not sure if it is anymore.

I wish you could donate to free open source software through Ubuntu software store.

That actually sounds like a pretty decent idea, with the 1 exception being Canonical would likely try mooching off of the profits in some way.

[kneekoo]

In essence he is doing the same thing those ebay sellers are with the live media. The ebay sellers are charging for the service of burning Parted magic onto a CD. He is charging for the service of combining the tools into a useful boot cd.

The amount of work is vastly different. One burns an ISO on a CD and it ships it, while one spends countless hours to put everything together, test everything, get back to the users that have issues and fix them, add and even code tools on request, and I'm sure the list is larger. Sure it's rather strange to find partedmagic.com with a "pay to download" button while the same page states it's free software AND there's no info about what happened. But we just can't compare the huge amount of work involved in creating Parted Magic with burning an ISO, it's not fair at all.

[Luke]

Few on my income use paywalled anything

Phoronix: Parted Magic Is Still Free

Parted Magic, the popular lightweight live Linux environment for managing hard drive partitions through GParted and Parted, looks like it's now behind a pay wall, but that's not entirely the case...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQzNTI

Very glad to see this is not supposd to be an actual paywall but rather an attempt to get people who make big bucks fixing computers for the rich pony up. I'm not sure what makes it available without payment, though. All the source links are present, I suppose you could download all of it from those links and build it yourself (which does constitute free distribution-does Linus Torvald publish binaries or not?).

I know this is a very ugly situation, but bad situations can make the thin end of the wedge. As a person who is not employed nor seeking the sort that would be offered to me, I cannot myself consider using anything that is behind a paywall. In this case, I do in fact make my own rescue sticks as someone suggested. In my case, that means an older version of Ubuntu in 32 bit, parted, gparted, LVM, MDMAM, and cryptsetup, plus a partition big enough to handle a dd image of my largest root partition plus the tarball of the last good image. I will probably have to make a 64 bit version at some point as you cannot chroot into a 64 bit OS from a 32 bit Maverick stick.

When I encounter a corporate site like a newpaper with a real paywall, I am usually quite aggressive about extracting the content around the paywall. The soft paywalls (number of articles per month, etc) don't work well against heavy anti-tracking where the browser runs in RAM, Ghostery and NoScript work togetger, Flash cookies are cleared every session, and unmounting .mozilla in RAM clears all supercookies(yes, I tested that, so long as Flash cookies are also cleared only browser fingerprinting is a possible but inaccurate workaround).

The way I see it, the issue if an actual paywall were erected would not be the personal choice to stop distribution except to paid customers, Rather, the issue would be contributing to the "segregated Internet" between free and paid content. If we ever do have open source software behind paywalls, newpapers will turn around and say "see, even the free software people do it." I'd rather see the Washington Post shuttered than have their paywall suceed (they've already been sold). My guess is lots of people agree-and rightly or wrongly fear that Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, even Debian could be next, and everyone who does not want to pay would have to fork the last free version and maintain from source from then on.

Perhaps the answer would have been to have a current and supported version that does not go on the website, sold on disk or uploaded somewhere for one time download, and an older unsupported version on the website, sort of the inverse of RHEL vs Fedora. Folks like myself that "don't do pay" could simply ignore the paid version the way we ignore RHEL.

[shirish]

My query is/was still not answered. Any diff. (visual or otherwise) between parted magic and gparted or are they the same thing ?

[kneekoo]

My query is/was still not answered. Any diff. (visual or otherwise) between parted magic and gparted or are they the same thing ?

Parted Magic is the name of the distribution that includes Parted and many other essential software for data rescue + stuff. If Parted is what you need, it's the same you would find in any distro, but Parted Magic is a very useful distro for many reasons so it's worth giving in a shot.

[brosis]

I think its wrong and the whole page looks crazy and anti-free. Instead of the link, I get windows-like payware site with a lot of ads. This kills the spirit.
For windows and mac users - go on, please PLEASE charge them, 20$ per copy. Yes, I know its bootable CD, but many will look for windows version.

They know only "shareware" so go ahead.


0k [-------x($2205)-] 3k
But for Linux users, come on, put the bar, count it down from 3000$ per month, from which 2000$ would be sufficient for you (psychology) - and until its empty, do it via donation (Flattr or Paypal, not this Visa/Mastercard only crap - not only US is downloading). Donation grants one membership for half year, which means more attention and a thank you?

We are basically back to the commercial spirit, the rome-like division upon payed civs and unpayed slaves, ignorace, hidden links, DRM and co. Whilst one is proud of some income, the spirit, the bug reports, the community will degrade.

Parted Magic is the name of the distribution that includes Parted and many other essential software for data rescue + stuff. If Parted is what you need, it's the same you would find in any distro, but Parted Magic is a very useful distro for many reasons so it's worth giving in a shot.

Worth less, right now.

[uid313]

I think its wrong and the whole page looks crazy and anti-free. Instead of the link, I get windows-like payware site with a lot of ads. This kills the spirit.
For windows and mac users - go on, please PLEASE charge them, 20$ per copy. Yes, I know its bootable CD, but many will look for windows version.

They know only "shareware" so go ahead.

Yeah.

if (navigator.platform.contains('Linux')) {
  // Show downloads
} else {
  // Show paywall
}

[Vim_User]

Yeah.

if (navigator.platform.contains('Linux')) {
  // Show downloads
} else {
  // Show paywall
}

Is that your version of the spirit of free software, where those that use software that you don't like have to be charged for every software they want to use? This shows us what hypocrites some FOSS users actually are: Oh no, I have to pay, but I want for free, charge others, NOT ME!!!!!

[curaga]

if (navigator.platform.contains('Linux')) {
  // Show downloads
} else {
  // Show paywall
}

Haha, that's excellent! Targeted content at its finest.

[Luke]

This is broken code due to routine spoofed useragent strings

Yeah.

if (navigator.platform.contains('Linux')) {
  // Show downloads
} else {
  // Show paywall
}

Many users spoof useragent strings to protect against browser fingerprinting. All of them
will see the paywall unless they boot from a live disk or otherwise disable their browser
security