[Tfug] [OT] Microsoft Windows 7: Upgrade or just buy a pizza?

[Jeff Breadner]

keith smith wrote:
> I started with a question - Who pays?  And a statement - No Free Lunches.
>
> I wish I had the skills abilities and resources to contribute.  I 
> applaud those who can and do.
>
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith
>

I was struggling a bit to express my thoughts earlier, but when you 
restated "No Free Lunches" just now, that really crystallized things for me.

I think that the free software / open source movement is now unstoppable 
for that very reason -- "No Free Lunches".

Once you seed a community like ours with great, free products, like 
GNU/Linux, BSD, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. you get a great number of 
people using these products.  For free.  Speaking for myself, and I 
suspect this is a somewhat common feeling, I feel like I'm the one 
getting the free lunch, and I need to repay someone, somehow.

Sometimes this repayment is in the form of buying a support contract 
that I don't necessarily need to buy (Crossover Office from Codeweavers, 
or ensuring my company licenses their RHEL installs), or filing bug 
reports with a package maintainer, or actually submitting code, when my 
skills seem up to the task and someone else hasn't beat me to the 
punch.  All of these actions help maintain this ecosystem.

So, the thought is that perhaps much of the work being done on free 
software / open source is the payment for services & products already 
received, and not the work that needs compensation.  This feedback loop 
keeps the entire system running, even if just a fraction of the users of 
the software actually contribute back to it.

cheers
  Jeff