Am Mon, 13. February 2006 21:31 schrieb jdd: > houghi wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 07:08:15PM +0100, jdd wrote: > > > > No. Please no. Before you know it all of the site is filled with > > advertisements. The only guideline should be that we don't allow it. > > And that should not even be a guideline, but rather a given. I would accept this for a company or an employee of a company which makes money with openSUSE or Novell products.
But I see also a need to support project participants who are involved in openSUSE on a more private way. You will often see that this people get involved more and more over the time and sooner or later the time they need to do so gets close to a professional involvement. So finding a way that this can be donated will be a help for this people to succeed in becoming professional. Or in other words if the balance between the time working for your empoyer and the time beeing involved in free software projects tend to go to the side of free software involvement there has to be a way to substitute the decrease of payed work time for your employer with the increase of payed work for free software involvement. > > may be. I think it's a little double-talk, because most of > us make on a way or an other some money from Opensource. > > I was next to RMS when I heard him say than the code must be > free, but not the man work. I participate during a long time > at discussion about how open source can live. This is what most self-proclaimed 'openSource evangelists' see as not acceptable and thereby support those who spread FUD like 'opensource' developers are close to starvation. As rms and other free software advocats always claim there is a must to enable free software developers and participants to make money by/with/aside their involvement into the free software community. > > And things are not that easy: boxed SUSE Linux has demos of > paid software, actually it was the case for the 3/4 boxes I > paid for. Of course we can't make a blackout on this (I hope > we don't :-). > > I think one of the main drawback of open source projects is > the lack of links to commercial back ends, but I understand > we may not be mature enough (as a community) to cope with > this... I think this is the point... NOVELL as a shareholder value driven company claims openSUSE to be the base of all future products it will sell. So there is a need for Novell to find a way to prove that they are really interested in the belongings of openSUSE participants (not only those they still pay directly). And they have to find a way / establish a procedere to do this. Otherwise it will be very hard to find participants aside those who are directly payed by Novell. It may happen that for the long run there will be not enough people willing to work for free to enable Novell to maximize their shareholders profit. But if Novell will find a way how the needs of openSUSE participants could be endowed (and this is in the first run to support participants to get their fridge filled) this might be a example for others to follow. This also will be a win for Novell itself because it will be the first company who will prove this and the first wins the market as we all know. I believe this is a chance for Novell as one of the old proprietary software companies to show the world that there is a way to benefit from free software development and participation in free software projects but also actively support the needs of those who are involved. regards, Thomas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
