Latest Fedora Core 3 status: kernel testing needed

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

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 at simpaticus.com>
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