[CLUE-Tech] GPL loopholes

[Joe Linux]

One thing I didn't like about RH was that at one point in time  you were 
forced to register your system.  I didn't want to do it because I was 
never sure I wanted to use it.  So going by your bandwidth theory, I'm 
doing RH a favor by ordering my disks from edmunds-enterprises and then 
just testing it without registering with RH to see if I like it.  So 
far, RH has never been user friendly enough for me to stick with.  What 
I mean by that is that RH has very annoying permissions problems ehich 
ends up making  it unusable for me.

In contrast. I paid for my Libranet system, and I am willing to pay for 
Linux software, but it must meet the "linux for mom" user friendliness 
criteria.  It cannot be too difficult to use because of excess security 
which is too difficult and obscure to change.  All in all, Libranet was 
a good investment.  I don't have to use M$ software, and I have a 
reasonably usable computer system.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:

>On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 15:36, Angelo Bertolli wrote:
>
>*snip*
>
>  
>
>>But in the end I think people have realized that since MS runs something 
>>like 90% of the desktop market, that merely having more people use linux 
>>contributes to the community. 
>>    
>>
>
>This is true to an extent... but every user also takes a bit from the
>available resources of the community as well. The code itself is never
>depleted, everyone in the world can have a copy of Red Hat Linux and it
>won't be used up... but that's only part of the picture. 
>
>For example, every user that decides to download Red Hat Linux, they're
>dipping into the available pool of bandwidth -- if 1,000 new users come
>onboard every week for Red Hat, just as an example, you start to have a
>pretty hefty drain on bandwidth for package updates, new releases and so
>forth. If too few of those people are bucking up money to Red Hat, the
>bandwidth costs start to become prohibitive. Even with a system of
>mirrors, large number of users start to put a serious drain on available
>resources for the entire community. 
>
>Then you have the ratio of users asking questions to users who answer
>them. Too many new users asking questions (particularly those that have
>already been answered before...) and the experienced users start to get
>tired of answering newbie questions and stop replying... if other users
>don't step up to help support the new folks, the system breaks down. 
>
>The same is also true of developer talent. I don't know what the
>attrition rate for open source developers is, but I know that it's not
>uncommon for some developers to get tired of a project or to have to
>quit working on something due to changed employment circumstances and so
>forth... and a lot of development for the kernel and projects like
>Apache, Sendmail, Postfix, KDE, etc. comes from people who do some or
>all of that work with the blessing of a full-time employer. A lot of
>Larry Wall's work with Perl, for example, was funded by O'Reilly and
>then by the Perl Foundation (if I'm not mistaken) -- that money has to
>come from somewhere... 
>
>In short, new users are a boon to Linux, and far be it from me to turn
>away a new user -- but we'll need a certain percentage of those folks to
>contribute financially and/or by helping in other ways, or the ecosystem
>will break down. Mere use is only a minimal contribution at best. Just
>having a large user-base won't be of much use if that user-base takes
>without contribution... 
>
>Zonker
>  
>

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