On 11/01/2012 11:14 PM, ch...@thinkpenguin.com wrote:
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.
I appreciate Chris’s efforts in supporting free-software. I am using one
of his laptops at this time running Trisquel 5.5
Tom Gilliard
Bend Oregon
satellit on #trisquel and #sugar freenode IRC
