Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)

[David Fletcher]

On Tuesday 15 May 2007 20:28, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>
> Yep. If half of the people who are willing to discuss the nature of
> Fedora in length step further to actually contribute that would make a
> pretty big difference but alas folks are more interested in calling it
> unstable or wanting the distribution to including proprietary software
> by default.
>
> Next time you want to complain ask yourself how much you have
> contributed in anyway at all to a every growing collection of Free
> software included in a distribution that you can get for free. That
> includes a lot of work many of which is volunteer driven in maintaining
> around 8000 packages, documentation, artwork, QA, release engineering,
> infrastructure, marketing etc.
>
> You can choose to help.
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join
>
> Rahul

Yes I've been making complaints earlier today, but I have also made a (small) 
contribution to documentation and will be happy to contribute again when I 
see something I think needs to be addressed.

The way I see it, Free and Open Source Software is a massive act of altruism 
performed by many people for the good of the worldwide community. Users of 
FOSS should recognise this fact and be sure to give at least something back 
to the community in return, even if it isn't a contribution to the operating 
system they use for free. Many computer users don't have the skills to write 
code or the time available due to family commitments etc to write 
documentation, but everybody can find time to go along to, say, a blood 
donation session or spend a few hours sometimes helping a charity, thus 
putting something back into the community.

Is this a reasonable opinion? I don't mind if the list disagrees, but I would 
be interested in reading some points of view from others.

Dave

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