On Tuesday 16 Sep 2003 10:40 pm, H.J.Bathoorn wrote: > On Tuesday 16 September 2003 23:02, Anne Wilson wrote: > > Write to our favourite mags, > > regularly, quoting Mandrake as often as possible. > > Not a bad idea (I'm a LXF subscriber too), could be worth our while > to make our preferences known. I bet there's quite a few of us > here. > Here's what I sent yesterday:
As a 24/7 Mandrake user, I read with interest Jono Bacon's comments on contributing to open source projects. I would like to comment on some of the ways in which we, the users, are making our contribution. Jono did, of course, mention Mandrake Club. Many would agree with him that the need to request money in this way is unfortunate. However, it is worth noting that MandrakeSoft have always believed that their full distro should be absolutely free in cash terms as well as in open source terms. Boxed sets are of course available, but every bit of the distro can be downloaded as soon as it is released. For a small company to maintain such high standards revenue has to be obtained from elsewhere. Voluntary contributions are a legitimate source of income, and many of us support it in this way because we believe that Mandrake could not afford to continue such largesse unless we do give monetary support. That apart, there are many other ways of supporting. Documentation is often woefully inadequate, not least due to the fact that the hardware situation changes daily. The only way that this can be addressed is by users contributing time and effort. Mandrake did attempt to start a hardware compatibility list, but found the task impossible. What was achieved remains available, as mentioned in your reply to T.W. Groves (Mailserver, Oct'03). There is however, an incomplete but much more up-to-date list growing on the users' TWiki site (yes, Jono, we have already started to address this). The TWiki pages were begun around 6 months ago, growing slowly at first, but recently the growth has been fast, so that we have reached the situation where the location of the information is not always self-evident. We are, therefore, in the middle of reorganising the index to address this. The original url of the TWiki web was difficult to remember, so one member has donated a domain to redirect you to the introductory page. Anyone who uses Mandrake, or is interested in doing so in the future, would benefit from browsing our web. http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org Finally, I would like to remind users that this is not a closed 'club'. We welcome material from any user, particularly if they are able to add to the hardware compatibility pages, or able to write a mini HOW-TO on any of the frequently encountered installation problems. Anne Wilson -- Registered Linux User No.293302 Have you visited http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org yet?
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