It isn't possible to operate ThinkPenguin solely on the funds from Trisquel
and other free distributions. Trisquel is not an insubstantial contributor to
our bottom line though. It's far surpassed what I ever thought possible. We
don't support Trisquel for the money. It has to do with it being pure to the
cause. If it wasn't there is zero chance I'd have contacted Rubén about it.
There are certain things that Trisquel excels at though. One of them is
hardware support. I'll take some credit for this. It's not so much that you
have a broad ray of compatible hardware as you have a small set of hardware
that works well. Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and other distributions can't compete
with Trisquel here. They include non-free components that could lose support
from the manufacturer at any given time.
Adobe's Flash
Oracle's Java
Lexmark printers
Alongside many others. There have been issues in the recent past and there is
no reason think that companies are going to stop discontinuing hardware or
support. There is a threat to losing support for anything dependent on
non-free software. Even where the license agreements ensure that companies
can continue to distribute a piece of non-free software there is no way to
make sure that software continues to be safe to distribute. It doesn't even
take one zero-day exploit to cause Canonical to pull support for a component
you depend on.
