They aren't selling a product (open-source software). They are selling a service - the effort to customise the distro and package it with free, useful softwares. Hopefully, they also donate some time and money back to those free, open-source softwares. Note also that GPL has never been hostile towards commercial software. In fact, with MySQL (before it was owned by Oracle), the FSF even endorsed MySQL's dual-license open-source business model.

Strongly disagree on the "unethical" part. Maintaining a distribution is a lot of work, and the infrastructure also costs money. Paying for the distribution of software is totally fine. You are not even forced to pay anyway.

Would it be less unethical to charge a $48 installation fee?

Because as far as I know, there's nothing stopping you from installing the free version of Zorin OS and then installing Blender, Krita, Inkscape, etc.

> it is highly unethical to resell open source software produced by volunteers intending to make their work free.

Why? ZorinOS users can still download Blender for free if they don't pay for the mega-pack. You have to imagine that it's not very hard for Zorin to follow GPL guidelines ("here are your 13,000 source tarballs, good sir") with this business.

You also can't prove that any of these volunteers are against downstream repackaging of their work. If they were really ideologically against the idea of people being able to sell Free Software, then they probably wouldn't be putting time into a GPL project. Commercial redistribution of GPL software has been a thing since the 90s, with much larger pricetags than $48.

I still don't understand the conflation of free as in freedom with free as in free beer.

You reserve certain rights to the code, that's not to say no one gets paid for _putting in work_.

If anything these models are about as close to providing _some_ manner of income to upstream projects. If Zorin donates a portion back, that is.

The Pro version has dedicated support and is meant for enterprise customers.

> But I take issue with selling open source projects that could otherwise be downloaded for free.

Why should they concern themselves with you taking issue? What I mean is what gives you the right to have an opinion on their conduct?

I disagree with them, I find selling free software to be a pretty solid and ethical way of funding free software, but why would they not have the right to have an opinion on this?

I certainly have strong opinions about many software vendors, who distribute proprietary software, often full of ads and tracking on top of that, why would I not have the right to find that strongly unethical?

Since it seems to be without any grounds that the other user is anonymously accusing named individuals of acting unethically, I wanted to ask what gives him that right?

If he has a real argument, let's look into it. If not, then he's slandering innocent people without any due and the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?

> the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?

Oh yeah, that's totally different. All we know if that this commenter finds the practice unethical and that's it. There's pretty much nothing one can do with this information without some further backing.

> he's slandering innocent people

That's a bit strong, they are just saying that it seems unethical. They find that maybe it's unethical. It's not less nuanced than that. Ethics is all about opinion anyway. We all have our own views on what's ethical and what's not so this can't be an objective statement from the start.