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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 10 October 2004 21:43, Tony Atkin wrote:
It would seem that most of us are supporters of Free Software and the GNU philosophy. However, I would not want to make people who had questions on installing this or that piece of commercial/closed source/non-free patent-encumbered/whatever software on a GNU/Linux system feel that this list was not for them.
erm, no in a way I disagree with this. If you're going to pay for software fine - there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that imho - but don't expect free support for it :) If a company ask/demands that you pay for their software then you've got a right imho to demand support directly from them. A good example of this is cisco, to get software updates you need a smartnet contract in return for which you get pretty exceptional support. You pay quite a lot for the smartnet because support cost a hell of a lot to put in place. As more and more 'normal' people (by normal I mean none techy or none geeks if you prefer) start to use gnu/linux then the support burdens are going to get greater. Will they be able to get support from the lug's on proprietry software, probably not because the geeks/techies on the lug probably won't have it installed and why should they - someone charged for the software so they can have the support burden. I don't think the community should be expected to support proprietry software. imho, if you have a problem installing a piece of proprietry software than this list isn't for you - you should be asking the manuf's not the community. There are exceptions to this (ie IBM +others) who charge for some of their software but also put a lot back into the community, and so they will get some support from the community because they also support the community. Writing code costs money - there's no doubt about this. But if you intend a decent size user base, then the cost of writing the software pales in to insignificance with the cost of supporting that software. Jon -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBalEqsE9YhfwRqJwRAl06AJ98+oPEonCfF1I7ZWCWJwiDwkLrJwCfWpeN gGWBnr9gGP5kCYHEhQqBWFk= =MKUc -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.