On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 18:00 -0500, Andrew W. Donoho wrote: > I was contributing to a commercial open source project called Redhat. > I still use resources of theirs. If they want to go contribute to an > open project, that's great. In many ways, I can view Redhat as the > 'United Way' of open source projects - I give money to them, they sort > out who gets resources to improve open projects. > > My budget can support about $60/machine/year. That is money currently > being 'left on the table'. > I feel pretty much the same way. In addition to that, it was Red Hat, Inc. who provided me with operating systems which have enabled me to either save money or make money since at least 6.2 (earlier use was pure hobby). They clearly know how to work with others in the open-source community, and I trust them to allocate funds with perhaps more wisdom than I could. Even if they keep said funds, they are welcome to them since, again, it was they who were my direct "contact" to the whole Open Source concept and in a very strong way the primary reason I was able to get involved and stay involved. They brought my learning curve down to a more manageable level so I could learn some of this while I was doing tons of something else. If I'd had only Slackware <shudder>, I would *never* have managed to get this far. So I owe them a lot, I think. The problem is that I *could* rechannel approximately $100/year from my personal money somewhere else. So what? I could move at least another $250-$300 of my company's money if I could argue that we were buying something, and with RHN I could do that. I could also help convince other friends and small businesses that RHN was a service worth buying, and eventually I think I was responsible for slightly over $2,000/year going into Red Hat's pockets. I would like to continue to tell people to pay for Linux. Most of them will not donate to anything, but *will* buy something reasonable. The $100 I control directly are peanuts. It's the other $1,900 (or much more, given time) that I could *influence* which is more interesting. As Andrew so succintly put it, that money is being left on the table. Crying shame, that. -- Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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