further to nick's musings and the thread - i don't think we should be giving too much or even any moral weight/value to the question of whether or not one's bought or not bought the distro(s) one is using. people who buy them generally do so for pragmatic reasons i'd say and are not thereby inherently the moral superiors of us mere mortals who download and burn/swap/steal/etc. morality really only comes into the equation when we get down to what people use the b things for.
as regards "returns to the linux community": active involvement is *still* the most valuable and important way of doing such. whether it's being a member of a user group like this one and lists like opensourcenz or writing code/docs etc for a project. one thing that's especially valuable is bug reporting - far too few of us linux and OSS users do this, yet it's easy to do and a really valuable contribution we can all make. just my humble thinks cheers peter ================================== On Thu, 01 Nov 2001 15:16:10 +0000 Nick Elder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > When one buys a distro I wonder just how much goes back to the linux > development community. By the time mark -ups are put on the distro and > printing costs, and packaging. My bet there isn't much that goes back to the > developers. > My bet is if we really want to help the linux developers and say we used > Mandrake, for example then a direct donation back to Mandrake or red hat or > kde, gnome or whoever would do good by ten fold over buying a package. > But then there is the other side of the coin I suppose and that is, it is > very good to see linux on the shelves of department stores around the town. > And of course buying direct from the distribution web site must mean less > middle men > > just thinking out loud here, > Nick E >
