Just a small poll on Ubuntu
 

How many of you Ubuntu users are prepared to pay for licenses should Canonical decide to start charging for licenses as MS does with Windows.

I'm 99% sure I'd look at other options ...
I voted no.

If I used Ubuntu regularly I would send a donation.

If I had to pay, mkfs.ext3 and a simple re-install with a different distro would follow within minutes of the change although I don't ubuntu and have 0-xtra cash lying around atm ;).

It's unlikely to happen for home users.

And I have moved this to General, as it's a speculative, non-technical thread.

Why does this thread even exist?
 

Ubuntu promises to always be free of charge.

:eek:

It is very unlikely that they would go back on this - I think the OP was setting up a bit of a straw man.

Even if they did decide to prevent free downloads and sell their OS (presumably as a nicely packaged version), though, they would still be required to release the source-code to any changes they made to software covered by the GPL and other copyleft licenses. This would leave the way open to someone to take the code and build "Commbuntu", in the same way as RHEL code is used to build CentOS. People would then be left with the choice of paying for a commercially supported version, or using the free version without vendor support.

This is apart from the fact that there would be many alternative distributions that would remain free, so it would almost certainly be an incredibly bad move on Canonical's part, prompting an exodus to Mint, or Debian, or whatever.

I didn't vote, because there wasn't an "Ain't gonna happen" option.

Same here.