As the subject says. You need to buy the installer module and you don't find this out till you begin the install.
Quite a surprise to me when I go to install the new Elive to disk. Would be nice if there was some kind of warning before people downloaded this crapola.

Interesting.
As Elive is Debian based,could you not just install Debian with Enlightenment?.

I just downloaded the iso last night, haven't looked at it yet, posting in this thread to subscribe to it. Geez, can this be true?

Had to dig all the way into their FAQ to find this:

You know, I've contributed to many Open Source projects, and am a contributing member of LQ, but, when I see a project like this, that hides the fact that you have to pay to play, it gets me a little steamed. Be up front, use the Distrowatch announcement to explain the fee, and I'll be your defender. Pretend to be free, then, ask for an installation fee while explaining that free isn't free, and I won't give your project a second look.

Quote Cartman from South Park:

I guess it's up to the marketplace. It is true that "nothing in this world is really free," and so there's something (good) to be said that this author is entirely up-front about that. Presumably, you are required to pay and you can expect to actually get what you pay for. (Which is a good bit more than you can expect from all-too-many bits of open-source "abandonware.")

Meanwhile, you can also choose to get steamed-up, pick up your marbles and storm off the playground. That choice is up to you.

Personally, I find no problem with paying for something if I get what I pay for. Quite frankly, source-code availability is not that important to me, except as a means of installing the software on my computer (and I'd frankly much rather find a nice binary package).

Naturally, source code is very important in that it gives the opportunity for collaborative development, among developers that may well be scattered throughout the planet. But we have to bear in mind that the point always does come where a very worthy project does grow to the point where it must have financial support. I'd rather see "a worthy project" (if it be one...) grow and prosper, not perish on any vine due to lack of watering. "Money, I've more-or-less got. Time, I generally don't."

I have no problem with charging money for Linux. But, I agree elive should not hide this information. You can't even find out the actual price until you install it! They should be up-front about the price, like this: https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html

On the plus side, the developers will waive the fee if you help them publicize the project, use it for educational purposes, etc. So, you do not strictly speaking have to pay to use elive. In the time it took you to complain here, you could have written a nice email to the elive dev's and explained your financial constraints.

Elive has always cost money to install...this is nothing new. I haven't checked the site lately, but you used to have to pay to download the iso...

You're paying for his time and developments...not debian and enlightenment

*double post*

I'm not going to debate the right to charge or not to charge a fee. I understand the need to make a buck but be upfront about it.

The only thing I am upset about is NOT knowing there would be a fee. I spent a lot of time and precious bandwidth downloading the iso which is now worthless to me.

They must provide the source code for free even if they sell the binaries. So technically, someone could build a free version of Elive and release it for free.

I've never actually tried it, so I didn't know that you have to pay.

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What is the price anyway? I looked all around the site but couldn't find the info.
I took elive for a test drive last night. It is a pretty slick distro, but there are lots of other nice distros too that cost nothing.

As I said earlier, it's not the fact that they wish to be paid for their work, it's the way they hide the cost. I still haven't been able to find out what that price is, and I looked over their website pretty close. "Small payment" is the closest thing I could find. If it's such a small payment, why not state what that small payment is.

Agreed. Tested elive on my netbooks, and wifi etc. was working on both out of the box. It doesn't work in "regular" Debian Lenny without some tinkering, so I would gladly pay $10 or 20 to save an hour of my time. But without knowing how much the "small fee" actually is...

The source code doesnt have to be free either... source code could cost money the binary could be free... or they could charge for both.

Either way; suckering you into to downloading then telling ou there is a price tag associated with the install.. "after" you start the install is pretty shady.

The FAQ Entry covering the cost is not hidden but is also not terribly obvious. It does explain that there is a cost (though it doesn't say what the cost is). The Wikipedia Page about elive suggests that the cost is $10. It also says that the dev versions are no cost and that the next stable version may also be no cost.

This is all allowable by the GPL, though I would say that it would be far preferable if the costs were shown more prominently.

I think they would actually get more $$$ if they just relied on contributors considering there iffy practices.