[Klug-general] slightly off topic?

[MacGyveR]

On Sunday 10 May 2009, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > RMS is a fruitcake, everyone knows he lost it years ago. I agree with
> > the philosophy that open source is best but this "freedom" crap is taken
> > too far by him and people that follow his every waking word (yes debian
> > users i'm talking to you). He needs to wake up to the reality that we're
> > not in the 70's, we're not all MIT and we certainly dont want a church
> > with him as the pope.
>
> Well said "Fruitcake" classic, but remember Eric Raymond has lots of
> guns in the trunk of his car, so don't leave him out!
>
> Freetardism thankfully is generally speaking dwindling. This is mostly
> thanks to Canonical and Ubuntu, shipping binary drivers, firmwares and
> wot not so instead of having a debate on some LUG list about the merits
> of downloading firmware from a company that refuses to release source
> code, instead we can watch DVB-T, use our Wi-Fi and get decent 3D
> acceleration.
>
> The only reason that user uptake of linux has increased is because these
> out dated ethical notions are NO LONGER RELEVANT!
>
> Same as all religion, people with sense move on, shrug and get things
> working, rather than praying to some random kernel hacker to solve all
> their problems.
>
> The benefits of open source are great, freedom to change, improve,
> understand, learn, I'm 100% behind that philosophy but it is just that,
> a philosophy, it is not a moral compass!
>
> I hate to bring it up, but you all should make sure that you ACTUALLY
> read Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists (Rather than taking the
> sketchy, aggressive reading from Revolution OS as the definitive).
>
> If I take for example wine-doors, over the last few years I've put into
> that project thousands of man hours, I've paid for hosting, domain
> registration and more out of my own pocket. So far, the monetary cost of
> wine-doors is approaching £3,000 over 3 years. The cost of man hours
> well, I couldn't even calculate it.
>
> Essentially I can't afford to keep doing this.
>
> Now I'm taking donations, and thankfully because of some generous people
> I've managed to pay my bandwidth bill and re-enabled the repos for going
> live tomorrow.
>
> Open Source only works because people get paid for it, I get paid to
> write open source code that's why it continues... Altruism always comes
> to an end, it's all well and good for the USERS of open source software,
> the NON-CONTRIBUTING USERS, I'd add. People who take take take from free
> software and never give anything back... People like that who preach the
> merits of open source without putting back are no better than Christians
> that don't practise forgiveness...
>
> BR,
>  K

Mr K i'm going to have to agree with you here, you need to give something 
bacvk if you are benefiting from someone's else hard work for free. License 
wise I don't really care about as long as software has minimal ads, does not 
steal my data and seems to have a decent looking future, then I'm happy to 
install it.

I suppose one way of giving back to the community indirectly is helping out on 
this mailing list.