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GUADEC/Gnome Fund Appeal
With the end of the year approaching, the Gnome Foundation has put together an appeal for help. You can also just head over to Gnome.org to contribute directly - and this year, they become a charity organization, meaning that contributions for US citizens will be tax deductions. Yay, tax deductions!
hey those Danm bums can get jobs, Like me. Now if you don't like givin' open source programers a bit of cash and gettin' a tax deduction then don't do it. But I feel that they are a valid charity because they previded a free public service with-out goverment funding or ADs. The other thing is I don't if they will get any money for themselfs but use most of it on more testing hardware and meeting in meat space.
I'm more general than that. I question why so-called "donations" are tax-deductible in the first place. Is it really necessary to bring out the "good heart" in people?
A True Donation is done without any expectation of returns or getting anything back. You give and let go, knowing there is more where that came from.
Why? By what criteria? Help a cancer victim and they'll die eventually anyway, help a famine victim and they might last until the next famine... but help get free code created and it has the capacity to last and help unlimited numbers of people for a long time. Help develop software that can spare the governments in the third world from spending money on proprietary software and they'll have more money over to spend on fighting famine. Help develop an equal playing field in the IT industry and developing countries will have a chance to create an indigenous industry without paying IP taxes to the rich world.
Worthwhile depends on your point of view. You may get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping someone more directly. If you do, I suggest you work at a homeless shelter or some similar charity, where you can see and touch the people you help.
Me, I prefer being charitable for more longrange goals. In the long run I regard it as more worthwhile.
When I think of all of the worthy charities that help the less-fortunate, the idea of a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers taking advantage of our tax code like this is revolting.
And the very idea of having your tax money being used to wage war against a very poor country isn't?
I know i'd rather spend it on helping GNOME.
Intel and AMD don't give their product and source code away for FREE.
You lack the ability to differentiate between a deserving charity and a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers. I do not. I don't need to assume that every organization from the Ku Klux Klan to Habitat for Humanity is equally deserving. I can look at what the organizations do to determine which ones are more deserving.
You lack the understanding of what this particular charity does. Gnome is an open source GUI for Linux, which makes Linux easier to use, which creates more Linux users, which helps to further the technology of humankind without secluding that technology from the masses. All for free. Gnome is a whole lot more than just "a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers." In addition, it is a technology that helps improve the technology (Linux) that the internet is reliant upon by attracting users to Linux and making it easier to use. If you don't know what Open Source is, I suggest you read Eric Raymond's book before you go denouncing Open Source organizations as charities.
If you don't want to donate to Gnome, by all means donate to what ever charity you find worthy. But don't call Gnome an undeserving charity just because it doesn't feed starving children in Africa.
Dan
You can go to any number of websites, download the Gnome source, and build your own. The fact that someone else provides the service of doing the download and build for you (e.g. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et. al.) doesn't make it "their" product.
You really like to focus on that misconception that the donations support the programmers who contribute. In fact you are so completely enamoured of that misconception that I'm going to just "walk away" at this point -- I have a feeling I'd have an easier time converting a Southern Baptist preacher to Hinduism than convincing you to let go of that fantasy.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You're calling somebody a communist and acusing them of being extremist in the same breath?
QT has the potential to make commercial development on Linux more restrictive than commercial development on Windows.
Yes, commercial interests don't have to use QT if they don't want to, and yes today it is only $2k per developer, and yes, you can develop GPL apps and make money off them... but
So I guess if you really want, GTK can be used for:
In short... anything which would not get commercial licensing and would not use a GPL-ish license.
There is a reason the LGPL exists. There is a reason why a library struggling for wide acceptance in Linux should not be using the GPL (or QPL for that matter) for distribution.
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.