"With respect to development, I sometimes wonder if we had to pay $100 to
$200 per OS plus another $100 for an office suite as users of proprietary
systems do, what the difference in development might be. I'm not advocating
this, and money doesn't necessarily guarantee quality, but with the number of
users out there we might be able to provide for some hefty R&D. Although the
Free Software community has not taken this route, it has still produced an
excellent OS and collection of packages that meet the needs of so many
users."
We would be limiting our adoption potential by charging the exorbitant entry
fees that Microsoft and Apple do. Users would simply avoid such
distributions, download gratis forks of such distributions and lose nothing,
so this route is unfeasible.
What we SHOULD encourage is for every user of a GNU/Linux system to join the
FSF as a paying member and donate to the free software projects they care
about most. If enough people in the community choose to do this, as I have,
we could actually begin paying software programmers to work on the most
critical projects full-time. Think of how much that would advance Free
Software. The Free Software Foundation has the discernment and experience to
use its donation money to fund the projects that benefit our community most.
