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Who Should Help LinuxFund Distribute $126,155.29?
Roblimo writes "The LinuxFund Web site was down for several months, and the project has essentially been out of business since last year. But MBNA kept the LinuxFund MasterCard going, and kept depositing money in LinuxFund's account -- to the tune of $126,155.29 when NewsForge reporter Jay Lyman finally caught up with the current and former project leaders and found out what was going on -- namely nothing. So does anyone have an idea what to do with this money? Want to suggest an individual or group to take over LinuxFund and run it right?"
He already runs a successful business.
He's not afraid to make controversial decisions and stand behind them (something one is going to need when one decides to donate to Project X and not to Project Y).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That type of money cannot buy much in the real world, but offer over 100 $1000 bounties for open source solutions that don't exist yet and we could see years of evolution get pumped into open source projects OVERNIGHT!
Let's use the money towards a Gentoo or Debian logo on the hood of a NASCAR competitor ;)
;)
Maybe Novell or Red Hat (maybe IBM even) will toss in a couple bucks for the effort?
What better way to capture 30 million US viewers at a time?
How about using it to resolve the OpenOffice.org/FSF/Java thing? Either pay developers to get the Java bits working in GCJ, or rewrite them in some other language?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Seriously, give it to Google to add an extra 126K to the Open source funds they're funding.
You can reasonable expect that they will distribute it with ethics rather than dip into it in expenses. If you appointed any other (read poor/legal/accountancy) administrator you would risk it being eaten in expenses.
Personally, I'd like to see Linux date and time libraries improved. I'd like to be able to convert from arbitrary time zone to arbitrary time zone, down to the nano second from any reasonable year up to 99999 AD.
Go spend it on that, even Windows time libraries don't handle this correctly (they don't handle day light saving properly) and its something I miss for a server.
I've had a Linux Fund card for a good while now. Clerks always say "awwwww what a cute penguin". But that's not why I got it. It was suppose to fund OS projects and encourage the health of the OS movement. Now that it looks like it won't be doing that, I think the best way to use the money to support OS is to ensure the legal right to tinker. OS is a subset of that genre of endevor, So I think the money should go to the EFF.
Actually, if you had two programmers working full-time on nothing more than using code validators to find bugs, then submitting patches to those bugs, you'd get a lot of work done in a year. Easily enough to justify the cost to any corporate backer. There are plenty of code validators out there, and the coders could simply target whatever package the validators showed as most in need at that time.
(Of course, in an ideal world, there'd be a kernel code freeze for a month. During that time, the US Government would spend a few billion on developers, who would fix the whole Linux kernel end-to-end, with near-to-zero bugs left at the end of that month. The process would then repeat for GCC, glibc, X11, Gnome and KDE, after which the national deficit would barely have budged, but software reliability would have skyrocketted.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Since LinuxFund isnt a 501c3 and the IRS doesn't recognize them as a non-profit they likely were not required to do this.