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.
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freesoft.org
Freesoft's Free CD-ROM offer