The Ethos of Free Software

• From the beginning of electronic computing, communities of users and programmers have seen the advantages of making useful software freely available.
• In many cases, this bounty of communal software has spurred computing to new heights. ITS and Unix are examples of this.

• Most software companies are guilty of shipping buggy code, charging exorbitant prices, giving poor support and not providing timely upgrades.
• The free software organisations, such as the FreeBSD Project and the NetBSD & Linux communities, strive to prevent these shortcomings.
• They aim to provide high-quality, high-performance, highly-useful software.

• In a nutshell: it's cheap, it's good, it's supported, and you can fix it.
• If you like free software, help the cause by donating some time or effort back!