New Funding For Free Software In The UK

AFFS writes "A new free software grants fund is available to projects in the UK from money raised by the UK Free Software Network UKFSN.org, the free software ISP set up by Jason Clifford in 2003, and donations to UK's Association for Free Software AFFS. The grants are open to any free software project or related campaign, by both individuals and groups."

Comments

Free?

[boeserjavamann]

I think OS should know how long it wants "free beer". http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Re:Free?

[sepluv]

What are you on about? Who's OS?

What's free beer got to do inwith anything? All the occurences of "free" in the story were meant in the origal sense (free speech).

Re:Free?

[boeserjavamann]

i'm talking about those donations-thing. everywhere i look at open source projects they are free of charge. i just don't think it should be the way that open source follows in the long-term.

Re:Free?

[sepluv]

What are free of charge? You still aren't making coherent sentences.

Re:Free?

[boeserjavamann]

sorry, my first language isn't english. i just meant that i don't think its not very intelligent to go on with the donation-path. open source should be able to refinance.

Re:Free?

[Brandybuck]

All the occurences of "free" in the story were meant in the original sense (free speech).

Original sense? Too bad I don't have a copy of Johnson's dictionary, because I strongly suspect that even there the English word "free" has several different meanings, of which "unencumbered by price" and "unencumbered by excessive legal restrictions" are but two.

Re:Free?

[Taladar]

English developed from german and french AFAIK. I don't know about french but as a native german speaker I know the german word "frei" which is almost exclusively used to describe freedom. The only exception is - ironically - "Freibier" (free beer) but I suspect that to be just because it is easier to pronounce then "kostenloses Bier" or "Gratis-Bier" which would be the alternatives.

Re:Free?

[sepluv]

Honestly. It is the original of those two meanings (dating back to the start of English whereas the other definition derived from `free of charge' comes from the C16). Although the word has a very long etymology (orginally meant `friend(ship)' and `love').

Etymology from OED (© OUP obviously):

Com. Teut.: OE. fréo, frío, fri{asg} corresponds to OFris. frî, OS. frî (recorded only as n. and in the compound frî-lîk; Du. vrij), OHG. frî (MHG. vrî, mod.Ger. frei), ON. *frí-r (lost exc. in the compound friáls:{em}*frî-hals 'free-necked', free; the mod.Icel. frí, Sw., Da. fri are adopted from Ger.), Goth. frei-s:{em}OTeut. *frijo- free:{em}OAryan *priyo-, represented by Skr. priyá dear, Welsh rh{ycirc}dd free, f. root *pri to love (Skr. prî to delight, endear; OSl. prijatel{ibreve} friend, Goth. frijôn, OE. fréon to love, whence FRIEND).

Shareware

[Spasmolytic]

We have the same thing here in the U.S. it's called shareware. If you want money for your freeware, put a price tag on it.

Re:Shareware

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to miss the whole fucking point, genius.

Heads-up: Linus is paid to hack on his kernel. Do you think he should be selling it instead?

Re:Shareware

[albalbo]

It's money for the act of developing the software, not for copying it. Shareware restricts you from sharing the software with your friend, that's not what the AFFS is interested in.

Re:Shareware

[sepluv]

Ye, shareware a.k.a. crippleware, charityware, &c. Who would want to use that?

Its not freeware (by which I assume you mean FRS or freely-redistributable software), its free software (freely copiable, modifiable and redistributable with the source code).

Remind me again why /. is so full of dumbasses.

Re:Shareware

[superpulpsicle]

Shareware is free software within a time period. After the expiration it's nothing unless you pay up.

Re:Shareware

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody is paying him, therefore somebody must be selling something, whether it's licencing or actual disks.

Re:Shareware

[tepples]

Shareware is free software

Almost all shareware is proprietary. Exceptions include BitTorrent mainline, Azureus, eMule, and any other prominent free software project supported through donations.

Re:Shareware

[sepluv]

"Free software"=software that has freedom (not that is free of charge).

Join UKFSN (ISP) to help the fund along

[sepluv]

FTR, if you sign up to the UKFSN as your ISP, all the profits will be donated to this AFFS fund.

They're also a really good ISP and not any more expensive than other UK ISPs.

Re:Join UKFSN (ISP) to help the fund along

[I confirm I'm not a]

They're also a really good ISP

I'll unreservedly second that. I'll also add that their hosting packages include Python (as well as Perl and PHP), yet are priced to compete with "basic" packages. Finally, Jason Clifford bent over backwards to help me when I was having problems migrating from my previous ISP.

all the profits will be donated to this AFFS fund.

Oops, almost forgot: UKFSN publish their accounts online. I believe "the management" were less than impressed with similar outfits promising to support Free Software, and then not being particularly transparent.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the software is free, why do we need any funding? Is this some kind of a scam?

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the Jason Clifford who runs UKFSN.

Many times I've seen worthwhile projects suffer because the primary, and often only, author of the software has to cease development in order to earn a decent living.

There are also several areas where Free Software offerings are either pathetic or simply don't exist. This is usually because there is little interest among developers in writing such software. One of the aims I had in setting out to raise such funding is to provide an incentive for good developers to write such software to be released under a Free Software license.

Don't forget that Free Software does have a cost. That cost may not be charged onto the users but the developers always have to pay it in terms of their time and resources. Increasingly they also have to worry about legal expenses as well.

I assure you that UKFSN is not a scam. The accounts are published in an effort to ensure that this is clear.

Connection to UKLinux.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the connection between this and UKLinux.net? I seem to remember Jason Clifford was involved in that as well, but some kind of disagreement over the related distribution (which was Mandrake + crypto, IIRC) made things go a bit pear-shaped. I remember UKLinux was once giving money to a Free Software charity too.

Re:Connection to UKLinux.net?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the person who set up uklinux.net but I didn't have any money so it was finances by Lance Davis and Brian Teeman. They were also the people who commercially distributed by Linux distro (Definite Linux which is very much defunct!) - that was a straight RH derivative with crypto and RAID drivers and other things that RH lacked at the time.

If you want to know why I left uklinux and formed ukfsn see my personal webpage at www.jasonclifford.com

Suffice to say that I left uklinux in April 2000 and have nothing to do with them.

At the time I left uklinux I was not aware of a single penny of actual donation. Everything was about spending money to promote uklinux (and the associated for profit businesses). The benefits to free and open source projects were a side effect. I didn't much like that.

The lack of accountability and the obvious lack of distribution of profits is what led me to form UKFSN and to publish the accounts.

Don't take my word for it though. Look into things for yourself.

Jason Clifford

Confusion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which one should I follow, again? Is it "Please register your share ware," or "Please share your registered warez"?

I can never remember...

Free(libre) Software as a Utility

[KrackHouse]

Once all of this patent madness is sorted I wonder if municipalities will consider hiring teams of open source software developers to help build the local "e-frastructure" (horrible word I know) similar to how they now provide things like water, police, and possibly wireless Internet.