On Friday 12 October 2001 7:00 pm, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Friday 12 October 2001 14:50 pm, Martin Webster wrote: I've always thought that there should be some sort of 'fund' that people could contribute to... a fund that could, for example, purchase that 'new widget card' that not many people need but a driver author for it could be found. Buy the card, give it to that person, let them write a driver and the card either goes to the author or could be given to the next person to add to the driver or who becomes the maintainer. It would cost each of us pennies... and would probably make Linux advance faster.
I agree with your sentiment. However, it's not sufficient to have a card to hand in order to write a driver. Manufacturers need to provide information to the software engineer too. And this is where we come in: lobby manufactuers if they don't support Linux!
And a better idea would be to have each distro contribute a $1 of each purchase price to the fund.
I think you'll find that they're 'donating' far more than this per user, for example: <q>In its activities, SuSE Linux AG makes good use of the largest development team for Open Source software. "More than one hundred developers in our SuSE Labs work on solutions for tomorrow. The innovations in connection with the numerous core components of the Linux operating system are directly implemented in the latest SuSE Linux versions," remarks Nussbickel.</q> (http://www.suse.de/uk/press/services/information/company/portrait.html) The same goes for other distributions. Also, if anyone wants a free boxed set of SuSE 7.0 please see http://www.suse.de/uk/company/giveaway/index.html. M -- Martin Webster <mwebster@ntlworld.com> Registered Linux User #230322 http://homepage.ntlworld.com/spider-monkey/