GUADEC/Gnome Fund Appeal 219
With the end of the year approaching, the Gnome Foundation has put together an appeal for help. You can also just head over to Gnome.org to contribute directly - and this year, they become a charity organization, meaning that contributions for US citizens will be tax deductions. Yay, tax deductions!
WRONG! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, now how much of my money is going to fund a PR engine and admin engine that benefits, almost exclusively, a few for-profit businesses? Pretty much all of it?
Lovely.
-t
Has Ximian conrtibuted? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:1, Insightful)
A True Donation is done without any expectation of returns or getting anything back. You give and let go, knowing there is more where that came from.
Re:WRONG! (Score:3, Insightful)
They're pretty clear about donations supporting a conferance/show in Ireland IIRC. No where do they suggest that the fund would go to developers or development efforts.
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
Worthwhile depends on your point of view. You may get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping someone more directly. If you do, I suggest you work at a homeless shelter or some similar charity, where you can see and touch the people you help.
Me, I prefer being charitable for more longrange goals. In the long run I regard it as more worthwhile.
Re:Tax deductions (Score:3, Insightful)
If the government would reduce (eliminate!) my tax burden, I'd gladly give my hard-earned money to charitable institutions. It won't. Therefore, to give me an incentive to give away even more of my money (and it is my money, not the government's), they should at least give let me deduct that amount from my taxable income. Preferably, they'd do even more, but that's highly unlikely.
Donating your time or skills is all well and good, except that when you have to work to make ends meet, your free time becomes precious. I'd rather spend what little free time I have on me first, and then on charity if there's any left. Add to that all of the charity organizations that publicly state that they'd rather have monetary contributions than contributions of time, and it becomes even less likely that I would donate my time. So, that leaves giving money, and as far as I'm concerned the government takes too damn much of that already. There's nothing left for charities.
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:3, Insightful)
And the very idea of having your tax money being used to wage war against a very poor country isn't?
I know i'd rather spend it on helping GNOME.
Re:this baffles me (Score:1, Insightful)
KDE has the backing of TrollTech who are pretty much focused only on QT and anything that shows QT in a good light.
GNOME has backing too but it's from organizations whose interests are extremely broad.
> by having a clean UI
It's relative. Bad UI's are bad...anything better than bad is subjective.
> using less resources
Really? Then how come I still see discussions on how to optimize KDE with compiler directives so it doesn't take so long to load libraries?
> the standard linux desktop interface
Another subjective statement. Can you say that with authority?
> the default UI in most distro's such as in Red
> Hat's Linux 8
Better check your facts there, chief!
> We don't see KDE group asking for help and
> donations
Really? Then what was all that noise I heard a while back calling for an accounting on the donations given to the KDE foundation?
Why all the bitching? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please note, you people saying "what about the starving children," that I am doing this in ADDITION to other charitable donations, thanks very much. I'm hardly snatching money from the mouths of the innocent to hand it over to pale and chubby programmers.
If you don't want to give them money, fair enough. Don't. You get that right with Free Software, you know? It's not like they figured out a way to make you pay for their products, even if you don't want them.
They're asking nicely - you can decline just as nicely, you know.
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:2, Insightful)
Intel and AMD don't give their product and source code away for FREE.
You lack the ability to differentiate between a deserving charity and a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers. I do not. I don't need to assume that every organization from the Ku Klux Klan to Habitat for Humanity is equally deserving. I can look at what the organizations do to determine which ones are more deserving.
You lack the understanding of what this particular charity does. Gnome is an open source GUI for Linux, which makes Linux easier to use, which creates more Linux users, which helps to further the technology of humankind without secluding that technology from the masses. All for free. Gnome is a whole lot more than just "a bunch of self-indulgent computer programmers." In addition, it is a technology that helps improve the technology (Linux) that the internet is reliant upon by attracting users to Linux and making it easier to use. If you don't know what Open Source is, I suggest you read Eric Raymond's book [amazon.com] before you go denouncing Open Source organizations as charities.
If you don't want to donate to Gnome, by all means donate to what ever charity you find worthy. But don't call Gnome an undeserving charity just because it doesn't feed starving children in Africa.
Dan
*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
You can go to any number of websites, download the Gnome source, and build your own. The fact that someone else provides the service of doing the download and build for you (e.g. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, et. al.) doesn't make it "their" product.
You really like to focus on that misconception that the donations support the programmers who contribute. In fact you are so completely enamoured of that misconception that I'm going to just "walk away" at this point -- I have a feeling I'd have an easier time converting a Southern Baptist preacher to Hinduism than convincing you to let go of that fantasy.
Re:Why is there a GNOME foundation? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're calling somebody a communist and acusing them of being extremist in the same breath?
QT has the potential to make commercial development on Linux more restrictive than commercial development on Windows.
Yes, commercial interests don't have to use QT if they don't want to, and yes today it is only $2k per developer, and yes, you can develop GPL apps and make money off them... but
So I guess if you really want, GTK can be used for:
In short... anything which would not get commercial licensing and would not use a GPL-ish license.
There is a reason the LGPL exists. There is a reason why a library struggling for wide acceptance in Linux should not be using the GPL (or QPL for that matter) for distribution.
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.