Are free software packages included in my subscription? If so, then why am I paying?

Your subscription entitles you to a wide array of applications and drivers as they become available. Some of these applications and drivers may indeed be freely available elsewhere, but not packaged and delivered in the same manner as Arca Noae provides them. In many cases, a portion of your subscription actually pays for the repackaging of these components to ease the installation and maintenance burden which is so often the greatest obstacle to keeping a modern system up to date.

A full discussion of the differences between archives, installers, and package managers is beyond the scope of this FAQ, but briefly, these three concepts may be defined as:

1. Archives: single-file bundles of files, with or without placement information stored in the package; essentially, just a collection of individual files.
2. Installers: applications whose sole purpose is to facilitate the unpacking of some type of archive in an orderly fashion, and (usually) to remove it (uninstall).
3. Package Manager: an intelligent installer, capable of maintaining a database of installed applications and dependencies, which handles packages containing detailed information as to where files should be placed and what other packages may be needed in order for the installed software to function. In addition, when uninstalling a package, a Package Manager checks to see if anything else which depends upon that package to be uninstalled may be broken in the process, and warns the user.

Thus, some of the software contained in the packages we offer as part of our subscription may be freely available in archival format from a variety of other sources, yet our package management interface is unique, and we provide this software in packages to be delivered and maintained by our Package Manager.