[ Thanks to helios for this link.
]
“Who is going to pay for the licensing of “proprietary
software” for projects such as ours? Dell? Intel? HP? Aren’t all of
these corporates involved at one level or another in the
development or use of Free Software? I can promise you that we can
scratch Microsoft from the list. They have refused to help us
twice, both times in 2005.“I wouldn’t put Microsoft software on any of our computers now,
even with a gun to my head…but that’s not the point. Are we, as
charitable and community service-driven organizations, subject to
their whim and multi-month grant requests for their software? It
would appear so. If Free Software were to be “discouraged” by the
US Government (not likely but possible) then we would either have
to come to these companies with out hands out, pirate the software
or purchase it.“To be honest…we don’t know where the gas for our vehicles
will come from for the next couple of weeks…we can’t even afford
to make deliveries right now, much less purchase software to power
the computers we need to give away.”