[CLUE-Tech] Suse 7.3 Again

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, Sean LeBlanc wrote:

*snip*

> On the supporting open source development, I've been feeling guilty since I
> haven't bought a boxed edition of anything for some time...I've been
> thinking of getting the subscriptions to OpenBSD (if I get around to finally
> using it) and to FreeBSD to round out the pointy edges on my karma.  :) I'd
> like to support a Linux distro, too, but we'll see.

I'd say that the Linux distros need the support a little more, but that's
up to you.

I buy the OpenBSD releases, as well.

> When you support a distro or distros, however, how does the money get used?
> I know makers of distros such as Redhat and SuSE have to pay folks to patch
> and test and select packages to put together, as well as maintain their own
> distro-specific admin bits...but if I wanted to say, give micropayments that
> would be distributed among several different, unrelated projects (non-FSF)
> is there a way to do that? I mean, I can buy every release of RedHat but
> would the KDE project benefit from that? Or XMMS?  The organizations and
> companies that put together kernel + tools need to benefit, but so do the
> original toolmakers themselves. I know I can donate to FSF and that will
> cover quite a bit of tools, but is there someplace better, where I can
> select certain projects and give money to? Just curious.

This will tell you how to help out KDE:
http://www.kde.org/helping.html#money

XMMS doesn't appear to have any request for assistance on the site.

In many cases, the original toolmakers have jobs elsewhere that support them
just fine. They either get paid to do development on the tools by their
company, and they're released as Free Software, or they do it as a hobby.
The developers aren't in this to make a buck off the project - they do it
because they enjoy it, and/or they're working on something that they want
as well, so they just make it available to the rest of the world as a
by-product of creating something useful for themselves. Kind of like making
a spice rack in your garage for your own kitchen, except the fact that
it's code allows you to give everybody else a spice rack too... but they
don't need to get paid to support the project.

Again -- putting the product together as a retail product is something that
most of us seem to want. A nice, easy to install and maintain product with
some of the rough edges sanded off. That's not going to continue happening
by sending $50 to the guys who develop XMMS and ignoring the folks who
do the packaging and other (not so fun) work for a living.

Most of the projects don't have any means to accept donations because
donations aren't necessary to the continuation of the project. Of course,
if you happen to work for a company or organiztion with publically-accessible
servers and a little bandwidth to spare you might contact them about taking
some of that load off by mirroring their site. With the demise of many
Linux companies and cost-cutting by others, mirroring and hosting are
going to be a big way to contribute in the future. Helping the project
by assisting with code, documentation or whatnot is also a good way to
see to it that it continues.

To actually answer the question, though, I don't think that there is
a centralized organization other than the FSF that helps support a
wide variety of projects. There was an attempt at something like that
called "LinuxFund.org" but it was a huge flop.

Take care,

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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