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Do Companies Take Software, And Not Give?
SirDaShadow writes "The Inquirer has an excellent article that describes how companies take from the Open Source Community and how few are giving back. At the end of the article, it says it might be tax deductible. This made me think...wouldn't it be great for the OS community if we could provide a law to facilitate tax cuts to companies who give to OS, or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?" This piece ignores the obvious and large contributions that some companies have made in money, programmer time, code release and even just lending their name and credibility to projects like KDE and GNOME, but it does have some truth -- see for instance the Busybox Hall of Shame.
Those of us who know Erik Andersen know his personality, and how he loves to rant and proselytise about anything opensource and Debian, with that ever-so-annoying patronizing holier-than-thou tone, and that he loves to find himself enemies that don't believe him or don't take him as seriously as he'd like.
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The people/companies he lists on his hall of shame page may very well have violated the GPL, or otherwise not have played nice with the community, but only Erik Andersen would make a page to denounce them all, then astroturf Slashfot to show it to the world (oh the humanity!)
Trust people in Utah who have worked for a shitty Caldera dot-com to behave a little differently from the rest of us
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seeing as you used government and beneficial in the same sentence I'm opting to not listen to what you say.
"Governments have a purpose. "
Yup... steal from one group for the benefit of another.
"It is our job, as citizens, to democratically influence our respective governments to shape them for the good of all. "
I don't recall taking that job. Even assuming it was possible.
"I suppose a person like you doesn't even vote, eh?"
Nope.