Why do you not donate to the causes?
In some recent threads, there were some implications and other statements that, when I recall statements from Fonality and freePBX people lead me to wonder: for those people that make money (regardless of whether it's your main livelyhood or an occasional paid project on the side) with "free" software and don't donate: why?
I can see that there are basically two groups of people that use trixbox et. al.:
1) hobbyists: regardless of your level of techical proficiency and/or experience, you are not using trixbox et. al. in any income-producing way. You have installed a phone system at home more as a hobby and/or to learn.
2) professional: regardless of your level of technical proficiency and/or experience, you are using trixbox et. al. to produce revenue directly (eg: a system-integrator/reseller) or indirectly (eg: you've installed trixbox et. al. at an office (home or work) that is the REAL phone system in use by that business).
For the sake of brevity, I'll set the first class aside. For the "professional" class of folks, there may be some that do not donate to the other people who have provided the software that the professionals are using to generate direct or indirect income. My question for those such people if they exist is: why? What are the cons that lead you to that decision?
I suppose there may be a sub-category here: I have seen a post where a system-integrator-type said he was doing to donate to freePBX a certain amount for every install he did. But what about the trixbox folks? What about the centOS folks? What about the mySQL folks? If someone is using the Mondo backup stuff, what about them? What are the reasons for donating to a subset of the projects you're using?
Yes, I do realize that this software is all covered by licenses that do not _require_ any payment(s) and in this specific case, we're not talking about shrink-wrapped software purchased from newegg.com, but if there are few people donating, doesn't that fit (indirectly) into a biting-the-hand-that-feeds-you category?
I can't quite figure it out. It can't be simple greed; if it were, system-integrators could simply increase whatever their bottom-line fee is and add X dollars that is ear-marked for the software projects. (Whether that X dollars is $20 or $200 is not the point, and whether the ear-mark is disclosed to the customer is not relevant.)
I REALLY am not making a judgement here, rather I honestly wish to understand.
*** --- >>> I also don't wish to see a flame-war start here for people that disagree with other people's values.
Thanks.
Projects involved:
trixbox | http://trixbox.org
freepbx | http://freepbx.org
Asterisk | http://asterisk.org
Apache | http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
Mysql | http://mysql.org
CENTOS | http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=23
PHP | http://php.net
perl | http://www.perlfoundation.org/contribute.html
Just off the top of my head... I know there are allot more...
fyi - I am a professional that has donated to both causes, I have paid for the training, and made random donations as well to both trixbox and freepbx, and even the NV project, because I have made money from the great work they do, and I hope that I can make more, and give more. I have also taken on the task of rebuilding and maintaining the wiki (after all the work that I and others was blown out several times)
It is amazing how freepbx has lived on pure donations, but trixbox seems to be a much larger 'machine', it would be nice if they didnt need these other mechanisms to feed development, but it seems there are more free users verses donating users compared to what their operating cost is, just think of the bandwidth cost to download a 600mb ISO 1000+ times per day. And yes, there is a long chain of 'big machines' that comprise this project.
Hopefully they can make it a better product, and hopefully more users can support them monitarily and in any other ways possible (theres plenty to do without $). I will be really happy when we can get some new releases out the door ;)
on the 2nd released week of Pro I think Chris said the install base was somewhere in the 20k area - most likely the majority was the free Pro SE version, so I think they are taking a hit on bandwidth.
I think that staff and developers that are pressured to work day and night deserve a little more than what we give them before expecting them to crank code out over night.



Member Since:
2006-11-15