[A83] Re: A couple of questions


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[A83] Re: A couple of questions




Open source has nothing to do with not charging money.  You might be
confusing open source ideals with free software ideals, which are very
different.  It is quite possible to charge money for software and still have
it be open source.  Software can also be open source, and monetarily free,
but not free software.  Much of Dan Bernstein's software, such as qmail, is
like this.  The program and the source are freely available.  You can modify
the source for your personal use, but you may not distribute modified
versions of the source or the binary.  You are free to distribute patches to
the software.  This is within software user's rights:

http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

As for dot.tk, they are not really free.  They claim to be free, but they're
not.  If you register a name as a free domain name, then it's not legally
licensed to you.  The only thing it is good for is to forward to your
website (incidentally, last I checked, this feature was completely broken
and unusable).  You can't even use it for email.  It is only a real domain
registration if you pay for it.  If the name you want to register happens to
be a trademark of a Fortune 500 company, then you can only register it by
making a (presumably very large) donation to them.  You must first contact
them to find out more information about the pricing or other details.  Other
domains that are common words and deemed "special" cannot be registered as
free domains, and can only be registered for a large fee.

Sorry, but dot.dk is just a money maker for some company, like most other
domain registrations.  Thanks, but I'll stick to registering my .com domains
as normal through directnic.com.  While ICANN has their problems, they are
at least some what predictable, and don't make up arbitrary, undisclosed
rules for pricing.

> I register domains with the friendly island nation of Tokelau, as they do
> not charge money (it is part of their cultural philosophy, kind of like
> open-source) Look at www.dot.tk.





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