freesoft.org
Freesoft's Free CD-ROM offer

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Freesoft's Free CD-ROM offer

At the end of June 2000, I made a public offer to ship a CD-ROM copy of the freesoft.org website anywhere in the world, for free. I asked for at least a $5.00 donation to cover the cost of distribution, and hoped that enough people would donate to cover the costs of those who did not. In fact, much the opposite occured. I received about 150 CD-ROM orders, and less than a dozen donations. While I'm willing to copy the CDs on my CD burner, I simply can't afford the postage, which would have amounted to several hundred dollars. It's not a issue of spending or not spending the money - I simply don't have it.

So I've discontinued the offer. If you want to burn the CD-ROM yourself, you can download the image from this URL:

http://www.freesoft.org/cdrom.iso.gz (158 MB)

4 July 2001 release
MD5: d7cf7c102ef4809e8700f86636e60bd7 (uncompressed ISO image)

The CD-ROM image contains the entire content of the freesoft.org website, including Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia, every RFC published through June 2001, a full-text search engine on the encyclopedia and the RFCs, and Windows versions of Perl and the Apache web server. It autoruns when inserted in a Windows machine.

Feel free to make as many copies as you like, and distribute them widely. Please mark the CD-ROMs with the name of the website (freesoft.org) and the release date of the CD image (4 July 2001). Thank you.

Why did I do this?

For an extended answer, see my essay on Capitalism and Christianity. For a brief answer, suffice it to say that I take the Christian Gospel injunction to "give to all those who beg of you" very seriously. I'm not entirely comfortable putting a CD up for sale, because that would tend to imply that I wouldn't send one to someone who didn't have a credit card number to type in. This way, my policy was clear - you could pay if you wanted, in the form of a donation, but it wasn't required to get a copy of the CD.


Up: freesoft.org

freesoft.org
Freesoft's Free CD-ROM offer