People selling Knoppix and also OpenOffice on Ebay

[yetanothersteve]

I asked the seller a question to see if they give back to knoppix or the community.
Wonder if they will answer.

http://cgi.ebay.com/FINALLY-THE-BEST...QQcmdZViewItem

[tdjokic]

This site Distrowatch is big promoter of Linux and yet you can find on it many Linux distro's for sale. I don't see anything wrong in it.

[Harry Kuhman]

While there is nothing legally wrong with selling a copy of Knoppix, I certainly would never encourage anyone to buy one. In addition to all of the other problems that you have dealing with an amazingly high number of dishonest people on e-bay (non-delivery of the product, excessive shipping charges, and other forms of fraud), you have a serious problem that these people care about maximizing their one time profit, not in supplying a quality disc. As a result the burn is almost always a high speed burn so that they can crank out as many disks in as short a time as posiable. Unfortunately we have seen over and over and over again that high speed burns cause many problems that go away when the disc is burnt slowly. So my advice is to download it yourself and burn it slowly (even if you have to download over dial-up by BitTorrent over several over-night sessions). The price of a CD burner is so low that not having one is no excuse, and you may even be able to buy and have one for as much or less than an e-bay grifter will zing you for a Knoppix CD. Alternately get a friend to download and burn a copy for you, you'll even be doing them a favor if they burn one for themselves at the same time.

[yetanothersteve]

I like the reply from them and hope it is true. I also hope that they are giving people good quality discs. Me personally, I have a high speed connection and a burner. I think you are right about taking the time to do a low speed burn of a LiveCD. That is probably what happened the other day to my co-worker who was running around the office complaining about the Kubuntu LiveCD he downloaded. I tried it and it worked fine on my machine BTW, but it's no Knoppix....

Hi,

Yes, we give back in many ways to the Open Source
community! For one we are spreading the word of the
Knoppix project and are an integral key to it's
further growth! We also donate to the Free Software
Foundation and help support existing Open Source
projects by providing a distribution means for Open
Source communities that other wise would not be able.
The Knoppix project does not make direct partnerships,
so we extend out appreciation in other means.

Our goal is to bring Open Source to the mainstream
consumer! To enlighten the world, that there is a
better option out there. We are quickly becoming the
premiere Open Source software distributor providing
retail quality products.

We thank you for your interest.

[Harry Kuhman]

You are dealing with people on e-bay. What did you expect them to say, "no, we're just in this for the money and we send out crap, if we even bother to send out anything at all"? And actually the Knoppix website does have an official reseller page (supposedly the resellers give a small payment back for the referals they get. So if the reseller wasn't even honest about this I have reserveations about any of their response.

[chris-harry]

haha... e-bay.. now trying to see free things... ahaha...

i can just imagine a cheap skate person, trying to sell there old 2.4 ver knoppix, which has been badly scratched and burned...