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

[keith smith]

I am humbled.  I benefit greatly from the open source / free software movement.  I need to find a way to give back.

Thanks!


------------------------
Keith Smith




--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Jeff Breadner <jeff at breadner.ca> wrote:

From: Jeff Breadner <jeff at breadner.ca>
Subject: Re: [Tfug] [OT] Microsoft Windows 7: Upgrade or just buy a pizza?
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 10:12 PM

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



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