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A New Year's Idea: Pay For Some Freedom
As you may have read the other day, the FreeBSD project is now taking donations via PayPal. And if you're in a clean, roots-UNIX kind of mood, the folks at OpenBSD and NetBSD (NetBSD PayPal) would probably also appreciate your goodwill, not to mention your money, hardware and time.
If you don't have a specific project in mind, but would like to donate some of your chunk of the time-money continuum to a worthy software undertaking, a good place to start is Software in the Public Interest. They can take both general donations as well as earmark for projects they support, like Berlin, Debian, GNOME and more. (Not into GNOME? KDE could use some assistance, including money, too.)
If you like the projects funded by the boxed-distribution makers (like paying for full-time work on endeavors like KOffice), you can do more than buy the box: Mandrake has recently formed something called the Mandrake Club as a gathering place for both people and funds.
To encourage (and reward) cross-platform goodness, supporting the Mozilla project is hard to beat. (This story was posted using a 9.7 build using the wonderful Modern theme.) Source of Mozilla wisdom Mozillazine could use some help paying for the switch to a new host, and to defray ongoing costs. Another good place to cast your perls is Yet Another Foundation, which supports the somewhat scrutable development of the not-so-scrutable Perl.
More generally, consider investing some money in organizations like the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), all of which help battle (in court and in the marketplace of ideas) the forces who wish to monitor and otherwise exert top-down control of your computer and everything to do with your on-line life.
Remember, with all of these projects, non-monetary contributions are welcomed as well -- if you can write or correct some online documentation, create test-cases to root out weaknesses, or create some pretty graphics to smooth the user experience, you can contribute. (Long-distance pizza deliveries to developers are also generally appreciated.) Teaching a coworker, classmate, parent or friend how to set up mailfilters on a Linux box, or how to edit photos in the GIMP, is a nice way to save them money, too. Making a difference locally might also mean contributing some time, money or hardware to help run local LUG events.
Note: Many of the organizations named above are set up as 501(c) charities; if you'd like to claim any charitable contributions as tax deductions, now's the time to get the postmark, at least if it's important to you for those donations to be on the current calendar year. For a few more ideas on ways to donate geekily this year, see Jack Bryar's Newsforge column with some more links.
And a Happy New Year's!
Donations can be sent in the form of beer....
to copy and send this off to Bill Gates. He likes giving out charity ... wait a second ...
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Just bring a keg to the local LUG. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug. Now that's a liquid asset.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"Hey, baby, turn around, I wanna look at your other side! No, your other side! No, keep turning..."
I fully expect to be flamed, moderated down, and generally discredited for this comment, but someone needs to say it, because it's important. Money? To heck with money. I have a job that pays for my food and housing and computer. I'll write free software whether you give me money or not. Money will not make a difference to me or make my New Year happier. Having a woman pay attention to me would.
The world is full of volunteers who work tirelessly to write free software, defend the public good in the copyright wars, and promote technical education for everyone, all without asking anything in return. A great many of these volunteers are frustrated, lonely, young heterosexual men. You aren't a techie, but you want to help? Wonderful. You can donate money, but it isn't what we really want. You can go write some documentation, but actually, that's a lie, because really you do have to be a techie in order for the results to be worthwhile. What can you do that's actually possible and would make a difference?
Go find someone who'll appreciate you, and let them know in a very personal way that you respect and admire what they do. Date a geek tonight.
The same logic can and should apply to geeks who aren't male heterosexuals, and nothing in this response should be taken to limit the application, blah, blah, blah, etc. That's not the point.
That's a pretty good troll! You had me going there for a minute.
Tell ya what. I'll start donating when you stop trolling. Sound fair?
The Free desktop that Just Works
And if you exempt software from market forces, quality IS going to go down the tube. Because we'll get fourty different office suites, a few thousand MP3 organising systems and toy window managers and programming languages and no central focus.
... just as long as you are saving as "MS-DOS" text and not some other kind of text...
This is totally right. With Open Source, you get tons of incompatible versons of basically the same thing. With one corperate souce for your software, you will NEVER have this problem.
Considering office suites, with Open Source, you have Star Office, Applixware, KOffice, and many more to chose from. It's so confusing! and most of these are compatible, but not always 100% compatible. With Microsoft you only have a single one: Office XP, nothing else, it's easy!
...Oh, wait, I forgot, you also have Office 2000 still around...
...Um, hold on a second, some people are still using Office 97 and 95...
...Ah, and I forgot about those people using the various service packs and each of them, not to mention that some of those versions are "professional" editions and some are "home office" and "small buisness"...
And maybe some losers are still back in the stone ages with Windows 3.11, did that even HAVE office back then? But, BUT all of these office suites from Microsoft are 100% compatible. 100%! (in "save as text" mode)
... er
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"