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That's a shitty thing to do.

isn't that what VastOne does? (joking! joking! sorry!)

el_koraco's comment sums up my sentiments.

Aside from the legality of selling Linux, (various distros various licenses) it may seem like a shady practice, but it's not anything the big boys don't do. Take Apple, yeah you can go and get your tech support from the failed graphic designers and art majors at the Genius Bar, but nine times out of ten your better off going to the network and seeing what the other users out there have run into. You already paid to get tech support straight from the horses mouth, but it's usually so terrible you're only going to get what you need from a bunch of nerds on a forum somewhere.

There's always going to be people willing to buy magic beans, so there's always going to be people willing to sell them.

Yeah, it's certainly not honest, but I wouldn't necessarily call it shitty. Well I would, most of us here would, but the legal system might not. Plenty of people are willing to pay for things that are available at no cost. Whenever someone can get something free, there's a special sort of jackass who's going to try and sell it. Heck people have made fortunes on selling just the information on how to take something free, and sell it. All those advertisements for money-making classes at airport hotels come to mind.

But take a look at ebay and count how many people are selling DVD's or CD's of books taken directly from Project Gutenberg. Head over to Amazon or B&N and you can find hundreds of books reprinted (in crappy two-dollar bindings on cheap paper and going for 15-20 bucks) expressly because they're out of copyright. In a society where economic interests establish a practice like that as acceptable it's only a matter of time till it becomes totally legal (and disturbingly more common) to charge for services that are provided for free by an entirely dis-interested third party.

This is the sort of things world governments need to address, not garbage, legislation-for-dollars, politics like SOPA. We're rapidly approaching a situation of political economics where anyone sufficiently amoral can slap a label that says "MINE" on someone else's work and charge the public for a good or service that is no more theirs than it is yours or mine. The people who pirate movies over torrent do it; some guy puts "aXXo" on a movie title and shares it with everyone, but it doesn't make it his movie, or his effort. But a portion of society is willing to think of it as representative of something "aXXo" provides. Give it ten years and #! support that consists of nothing more than a link here, provided by the schmuck down the street, will be accepted as something he provides; something he can profit from.

Wow, that became way longer than I intended. But if you liked that little rant consider reading this:
http://ethrg.org/pdf/20_mine.pdf

Well, I'm all for keeping industry and profit, hell I work in industry and love to make a profit. We just seriously need to look at what it's acceptable to make a profit from, and who should be permitted to make that profit. I have strong uninformed opinions about this!

Also great, I got two books coming in the mail today and now I gotta somehow find the time to read this crazy Tao Te Ching thing too?! I would just skip it but it looks freaking awesome!