Spyware in Audio Galaxy

LintMan and a zillion other people wrote in about the story on Portal of Evil discussing spyware bundled with Audio Galaxy that seems to be even more nasty than usual. Others have written about it as well - there's Counterexploitation and Wired stories. Frankly, we're kind of bored by all these spyware/shareware stories (don't people learn?) so we let it sit around in the submissions bin for a few days, until, say, a slow Saturday night.

Comments

Imagine how much GPL development could be funded?

[BitMan]

Now I feel there is no excuse for RedHat users such as myself not to help fund RedHat.

In praise of 100% GPL-focused RedHat

RedHat, despite what you might think of their distro or business-side tactics, funds probably the greatest number of 100% GPL software developers (since VA no longer does). I cannot stress enough the importance of this fact. Every distro enjoys the fruits of RedHat employee labor, and not just Gnome developments either.

Imagine the number of developers that could be hired

For every 2,000 people who sign up for the service, that's $120K/year for RedHat. Figuring half of that goes to upgrades to their network infrastructure to support the additional downloads, that leaves $60K to fund another developer on-staff. If all 2 million RedHat sysadmins (my estimate is 2M, which equals ~20M installs, ~10 installs/per sysadmin on average) coughed up $60/year, that's $120M/year for RedHat. That could equate to adding $60M for developers, or about a thousand employees!

Personal note

I've been a total RedHat leech here. Although I have worked for various companies who have paid for Cygnus tools (Cygnus is a division of RedHat), I've pretty much only bought the boxed sets on every .2 release (and I haven't bought 7.2 yet). I've been running RedHat on this system (through various hardware upgrades) since 4.2, only re-installing once to move to XFS (RedHat 7.0.92 + XFS 1.0 betas was a "clean" install).

I've installed RedHat on close to 500 systems now, and I'm sure well over half of those are still in use. So that amounts to about $0.10 per system I've installed. Definately not enough IMHO. I want to change this. This is a great avenue to do so.