Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[Federico Ferreres <fferreres@ojf.com>]

On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 10:11, Hans Reiser wrote:

> Mine is a direct fee payment from users with allocation of fee 
> instructions accompanying the fee.  

Does it matter who collects the money? It should only be based on
convenience. And it's much easier/safer/efficient to have the OEM
collect the funds than any other party.

Imagine going to a store and asking "Two Sony Vaio laptops please, and
make them OSS, NOT Windows" and beign charged the computer's quoted
price (or maybe even less, but never more). Imagine not having to
research on how to get a refund for that Windows license that came
bundled and that you don't need. Imagine not having to _require_ the OEM
to preinstall any OSS on the machine for it to "OSS ready" (unless you
ask for redhat/suse/etc), yet beign able to use any OSS without having
to pay any extra dime.

There's this ilusion in normal people's minds that Windows is free
because it comes with the computer. We should take advantage of that
fact. And anyone that claims OSS is free is having an ilusion for OSS
costs money to develop and to be able to use OSS you need to spend a lot
of money (even if you don't pay anything back to the OSS developers).

Small note: funding OSS is not about the money. The money here is a
medium (funds) for an end (free software). Only businesses invert the
relation and put money as the objective objective and turn work into a
medium.

> >Everything else remains the same (as Hans and I have said, the users
> >will have a limited ability to chose what they need. I say limited
> >because for an Office application to work the core must remain funded
> >even though the user may not notice it).
> >
> Limited?  What limit?  If you  pay the X% of hardware cost fee you can
> use all the software in the pool.

Here's a clear version of what I meant: Limited ability to "allocate the
money paid" based on what they'd like to be improved.

> You are assuming they think.  They don't.  They sense herd movement. 
>  This is wise of them, because unless a large portion of the herd
moves 
> to it, it has no value.  Thus it has no value.  Thus the herd does not
move.

Whatever they decide is fine for me as it's their show and not mine. You
and Larry can think differently, as you are involved in developement. 

> -- 
> Hans
> 

Federico