Re: vendor boycotts, etc.

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

>What I'm wondering is if we should find someone who would be willing to
>coordinate a section of the web site, a list, etc., to maintain a list of
>companies, both software and hardware, that refuse either actively or
>passively to support Linux, and act as a center for boycott and
>'letter-writing campaigns' in order to attempt to get these companies to
>support Linux.

If you want to gather the people and write the website, I'll put it on
belegost...(aren't net connections with multiple T3's fun? :)

>One part of this could be setting up a group of people who would be
>willing to provide help to companies in order to port their software to
>Linux.  Some could be volunteer, some might be hirable, some via e-mail,
>some onsite, etc.  That would remove one more barrier that these companies
>can put in front of us.  Who can refuse free help??? (don't answer...)

Do you really think there will be that many people around willing to do
for free what other companies would pay them to do? I mean, why not get
Redhat to pay you for porting cool programs and making things work under
linux? (If you answer "because maybe you're not a good enough programmer
for redhat to want you", then I think you should rethink this proposal.)

>I think this would be a very useful part of SEUL, and that it fits well
>into our goals (we have to have commercial applications available before
>the public will buy into Linux on an end-user basis).  Any comments?

Granting that a lot of end-users consider software that they pay for to be
of higher quality, it's always been my dream to have a complete suite of
commercial-grade programs available under the GPL or similar license,
complete with commercial-grade support either from the people who wrote
the programs or from other volunteers who can fix them if necessary.
It already happens on a small-scale. The difference is that the people
who need support right now for GPL-based programs are generally technically
oriented enough that they don't call tech support asking where
the 'on' button is (which is mostly what commercial phone people deal with).

Nobody who writes free software wants to spend most of their time
answering syntax questions that are written at the top of the man page,
especially if said person isn't being paid to answer such inane questions.

Is there a solution to this? (Woah, this just pulled itself way offtopic.
Ah well.)

--Roger

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