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GUADEC/Gnome Fund Appeal

Posted by Hemos on from the good-cause-monies dept.

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!

5 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    its about time this bloatware bit it .. if i wanted
    a slow, crappy interface i'd just use windows ..
    except windows doesn't reduce a 1.8ghz machine to
    a crawl.

    and you can actually do something with it besides
    run an xterm with irc in it.

    wake up and smell the coffee, people

  2. Re:A Charity Organization? by fmaxwell · · Score: 0, Troll

    Now if you don't like givin' open source programers a bit of cash and gettin' a tax deduction then don't do it.

    I won't.

    But I feel that they are a valid charity because they previded a free public service with-out goverment funding or ADs.

    When the government grants tax-deductible status, that is government funding. If you are in the 30% tax bracket, 30% of "your" donation came from the government.

    But that is simply not the point. There are charities to help homeless people, cancer victims, orphans, and third-world famine victims -- just to name a few causes. That's a whole lot more worthwhile than sending money to people who are getting their jollies by coding a GUI.

  3. Re:A Charity Organization? by fmaxwell · · Score: 1, Troll

    By what criteria?

    By my criteria.

    Help a cancer victim and they'll die eventually anyway, help a famine victim and they might last until the next famine...

    Reducing human suffering is more important than writing GUIs. I guess your point is that you'd rather see people suffer and die than have to use Gnome in its current state -- which it got to with no tax-deductible donations.

    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.

    The amount of money spent by third-world countries on software is insignificant compared to the cost of fighting famine, river blindness, AIDS, cancer, etc. If they got all of their computers for free, it would make little difference. The amount of money that, say, Sudan could save by using free software would make no significant difference to lives of the people of that country. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

    Besides, there is already viable, free software. I don't think that an even more polished version of Gnome is what will cure the AIDS epidemic in sub-saharan Africa.

    Me, I prefer being charitable for more longrange goals.

    Are you sure that you don't just prefer charities that create software that you personally benefit from?

  4. Re:Yes, and for a good reason. by fmaxwell · · Score: 1, Troll

    First off, what makes you think that the GNOME project, or any free software project does not help the less fortunate.

    To some small extent, it does. But it helps the fortunate far more. The majority of third-world countries have very few computers relative to their population. The amount of money that could be saved on software would have no discernible effect on the lives of their citizens.

    The GNOME project, along with the rest of GNU, is constantly being deployed in less developed countries.

    And it is good enough already. These people need food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, not a more polished version of a Linux GUI.

    How the hell is any free software project self-indulgent?

    Because it is a hobby for those involved. They do it for personal fulfillment.

    They clear their overhead and donate their product and services to anyone who needs them, just like any legitimate charity.

    Do you think that Habitat for Humanity will be donating buildings to Sun and RedHat? Of course not. They will donate them to needy families. Legitimate charities do not invest tax-deductible contributions to develop products that are resold by big business.

  5. another coupe deville scored buy refudlicans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    " Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) spoke this morning on C-SPAN about the Bush administration (and Republican side of the aisle in Congress) subversion of the Sarbanes-Oxley Corporate Accounting Reform Bill and (with ex-SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt) of the new Accounting Oversight Board by "starving" (badly underfunding) both the SEC and the Accounting Oversight Board. Even now that Donaldson has been nominated as the new SEC Chairman, Bill Webster is still the (lame duck) chairman of the Accounting Oversight Board and House Republicans have blocked any increase of funding for enforcement of our securities laws stating that they plan to pass a continuing resolution next month to merely maintain paltry pre-Sarbanes Bill funding levels. This cripples the securities and accounting fraud reforms which the public (myself included) had hoped for from our government. House Democrats (including Markey, Frank, and Dingle) have pushed consistently for increased funding and now have issued a formal report on the SEC Accounting Oversight Board Chairman Selection Process which reflects a deplorable negligence by the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans. Whether this negligence is "accidental" or part of a stealthy and intentional strategy to undermine all such reforms and to enable continuing fraud on the massive and highly damaging scale which has been preying on individual investors for at least the past three years, the chilling effect on our securities markets (especially the stock market) will continue and deepen. The President's promises to double SEC funding (quickly) have been broken. As Ed Markey mentioned, this is the first time a major securities investigation has been led by a state attorney general (Spitzer) without any high federal official visibly leading it instead. This clearly indicates to me the administration's unwillingness to take corporate scandals and restoration of investor confidence honestly and seriously enough to effectively reform this fraudulent accounting environment well enough to restore our securites markets to sufficient safety and honesty for my savings to find a home there. I cannot imagine investing my hard-earned savings in stocks of publicly-held corporations traded on the NYSE or NASD while this travesty of "reform" at the administrative/funding level continues. It was difficult enough for legislative reforms to be enacted by Congress (and the President signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill into law even though he now refuses to effectively implement it, eliminating it via negligence) only to see them blocked by an administration led by those who were themselves too much involved in alleged securities improprieties or fraud in the past. The fox is still guarding the henhouse where we've been asked to invest our own nest-eggs."

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