I was recently able to gather a number of people from the ColdFusion community together in order to pay a programmer to do a port for us of an open source application. The application was the Visual Regular Expressions editor from KDE and it was ported to a standalone windows application. Still open source but paid for by a group.
I'll be releasing it as soon as my crashed computer is back up.:)
Having met and been personally snubbed by him, I have to agree. Things just have to fit his idea of 'right' and if not, he'll either ignore it or push it away.
Please note that there are many who will disagree with me on this and know ESR. They are welcome to their opinion of him just as I should be welcome to mine.
What's the level of cash in to be a non-profit? I get donations once in a while. I've also just sold $450 worth of banner space to a company for advertising. Finally, I've got a company who's given me a product in return for some advertising space. At what point am I 'for profit'? 2k a year total? 1k? 10k in products?
I'm not unique here. I'm just like every other 'tech fan' site out there with little to no money in and lots out. Tax us and we die. We die and the support for a product dies with us (to a degree). Support dies and the product withers. Products wither and/or die and the economy goes where?
Until that forum is taxed as well. The reason people come to me rather than going to the alt.coldfusion group or the macromedia forums is because I provide their tech directly to their mailbox. People tend to like their information direct. I also take care of all the spam, viruses and other 'junk' that gets in the way of a good information source (custom filters across the board).
Bottom line is, email is more direct and what the majority of people I've talked to want. Why should they be forced to something else because of spammers.
Personally, I've got my own anti-spam plans. All of the archives will be using this code (http://www.fusionauthority.com/alert/index.cfm?al ertid=121#tags5) to hide any email addresses in posts and any post to the lists will hide the email address of the true poster (not their name) while offering an alternate way for individuals to communicate with each other. This thread talks about those plans (http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?m ethod=messages&threadid=23625&forumid=4&refresh=0) .
Bottom line is that I believe that there are technical responses to spam that can be taken rather than a tax which will be an unfair burden to many. And this isn't even going into who controls the money and what its used for.
I fail to see how I'm being subsidized by those who receive and pass the messages. Yes, they are using resources in this manner but nothing is coming to me. All my resources are going out in the form of hosting, bandwidth, etc.
How will my paying thousands of dollars a day to send out email be subsidized? Will all the recipients be paying me to send them the mail? I think not. This would be the end of community email lists.
As for the lists, I run the House of Fusion (www.houseoffusion.com) which is a community site who's main feature is the CF-Talk and other mailing lists. These are all archived on the site and are used by a large number of ColdFusion developers both directly and indirectly (archives, NNTP feed, direct mail, etc.)
I'm quite sure that PHP, Asp, Perl and other languages have technical mailing lists of the same size or larger. Tax them and they're gone.
I run a number of mailing lists and on a good day can send out a million messages. This is all for community support with no profit at all on my side. A law like this would kill me and every other community supporter who supplies such a service.
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I was recently able to gather a number of people from the ColdFusion community together in order to pay a programmer to do a port for us of an open source application. The application was the Visual Regular Expressions editor from KDE and it was ported to a standalone windows application. Still open source but paid for by a group. I'll be releasing it as soon as my crashed computer is back up. :)
Having met and been personally snubbed by him, I have to agree. Things just have to fit his idea of 'right' and if not, he'll either ignore it or push it away. Please note that there are many who will disagree with me on this and know ESR. They are welcome to their opinion of him just as I should be welcome to mine.
What's the level of cash in to be a non-profit? I get donations once in a while. I've also just sold $450 worth of banner space to a company for advertising. Finally, I've got a company who's given me a product in return for some advertising space. At what point am I 'for profit'? 2k a year total? 1k? 10k in products?
I'm not unique here. I'm just like every other 'tech fan' site out there with little to no money in and lots out. Tax us and we die. We die and the support for a product dies with us (to a degree). Support dies and the product withers. Products wither and/or die and the economy goes where?
Until that forum is taxed as well. The reason people come to me rather than going to the alt.coldfusion group or the macromedia forums is because I provide their tech directly to their mailbox. People tend to like their information direct. I also take care of all the spam, viruses and other 'junk' that gets in the way of a good information source (custom filters across the board). Bottom line is, email is more direct and what the majority of people I've talked to want. Why should they be forced to something else because of spammers. Personally, I've got my own anti-spam plans. All of the archives will be using this code (http://www.fusionauthority.com/alert/index.cfm?al ertid=121#tags5) to hide any email addresses in posts and any post to the lists will hide the email address of the true poster (not their name) while offering an alternate way for individuals to communicate with each other. This thread talks about those plans (http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?m ethod=messages&threadid=23625&forumid=4&refresh=0) .
Bottom line is that I believe that there are technical responses to spam that can be taken rather than a tax which will be an unfair burden to many. And this isn't even going into who controls the money and what its used for.
I fail to see how I'm being subsidized by those who receive and pass the messages. Yes, they are using resources in this manner but nothing is coming to me. All my resources are going out in the form of hosting, bandwidth, etc. How will my paying thousands of dollars a day to send out email be subsidized? Will all the recipients be paying me to send them the mail? I think not. This would be the end of community email lists. As for the lists, I run the House of Fusion (www.houseoffusion.com) which is a community site who's main feature is the CF-Talk and other mailing lists. These are all archived on the site and are used by a large number of ColdFusion developers both directly and indirectly (archives, NNTP feed, direct mail, etc.) I'm quite sure that PHP, Asp, Perl and other languages have technical mailing lists of the same size or larger. Tax them and they're gone.
I run a number of mailing lists and on a good day can send out a million messages. This is all for community support with no profit at all on my side. A law like this would kill me and every other community supporter who supplies such a service.
And they're even better at being killed by terrorist scumbags who would rather have war than peace.