exactly. you don't see redhat calling everyone that uses centos cheaters -- hell, centos is part of redhat (even though it's independent).

Sorry Red Hat killed Red Hat for end users (in favor of maintaining Red Hat for enterprise users)... And only in recent years admitted it was an error.

So you did chose bad your example. Cent OS was an answer to that, providing a Red Hat binary distribution without any support, for free.

What they said is that they want to sell elementary OS. But going completely in that direction is pointless because someone will just fork the project and offer it for free. So what they did is make you enter $0, so when you do get it for free, it feels like you've cheated the system.

What's wrong with that?

Let's say everyone starts donating and they receive tons of money. Canonical, Debian and everyone else notices this and starts bitching about how eOS guys cheated the system by earning money off their work but din't pay anything back. Would this still seem right?

Unless I'm mistaken, they didn't call people who download free software for free cheaters.