* Andrew Suffield (asuffield@debian.org) wrote: > On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 04:33:14PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote: > > And I disagree, and these are only a few things upon which we could > > spend money, if we weren't so terribly concerned that it's a bad idea to > > spend money and we should just save it all in case the US gets nuked. > > If the US gets nuked then all our money will be worthless paper, since > it's currently stored in US funds. I suppose that's true, though, well, it depends on how much of the US gets nuked I guess. :) > Debian is sustainable precisely because it operates without money. If > we fall into the trap of just throwing money at problems then it will > rapidly become the only way to solve any problem (how can we ask for > hardware donations when we're willing to buy hardware?), and that > isn't sustainable. Your hypothesis is, uhm, interesting. Ignoring the commercial aspect, since you don't mention that as part of the concern here, you feel that if Debian uses money from cash donations to buy hardware it needs that companies won't donate hardware? I find it hard to believe that companies who donate hardware to us only do it because they, essentially, feel sorry for the poor street urchin. I expect they donate hardware to us because a) we tell them we need it (we do), and b) they feel what we're doing is good and beneficial to them and others, and mostly the later at that. I'd also like to point out that there are certain companies which donate quite a bit for all the right reasons and might actually appriciate it if Debian was able to sustain itself at least in part. Personally, I feel bad that we ask certain people to sustain us a great deal and *don't* make any attempt to become self-sustaining at all. > > Little hard to get much done when you don't have the involvment of the > > largest (far and away) project- we've seen that before. > > That's SPI's organisational problem. We should not let it become our > problem. > > Debian is not a part of SPI, and is not controlled by SPI. SPI seems > to have difficulty in realising this. They hold our assets, nothing > more. We need it to remain this way. SPI will just have to get used to > it. This is (almost) amusing. I suppose Debian doesn't actually exist, that's unfortuante, but perhaps that makes your hypothesis that it can't exist if it has money almost make sense. > > hot-babe. > > Are you seriously suggesting that is a significant part of what Debian > does? No, I'm suggesting that w/ packages like hot-babe Debian *is* becoming a clearing house for all things somewhat related to free software. Stephen
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