Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)

Anthony J Placilla anthony_placilla at SUTH.COM
Mon May 21 17:39:19 UTC 2007



Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 19 May 2007, Anne Wilson wrote:
>> On Saturday 19 May 2007, Thomas Cameron wrote:
>>> Mauriat M wrote:
>>>> On 5/15/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> 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.
>>>> Must I contribute to expect a somewhat stable and useful general
>>>> purpose operating system?
>>> TANSTAAFL
>> What the blue blazes does that mean?
>>
>> Anne
> 
> Oh, my. Sad, even shocking my dear Anne. You just gave yourself away as being 
> someone who has never read one of sci-fi's more famous authors, one Robert A. 
> Heinlein, now deceased, who was rather fond of the expression, but I think he 
> borrowed in from Ernest Hemingway back in the dim mists of time now.
> 
> What it stands for is the first letter of each word in "There ain't no such 
> thing as a free lunch"
> 


Wonkipedia seems to indicate the original attribution (albeit not
exactly as RAH wrote it) to Leonard P. Ayres


"-- In 1950, a New York Times columnist ascribed the phrase to economist
Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company. "It seems that shortly
before the General's death [in 1946]... a group of reporters approached
the general with the request that perhaps he might give them one of
several immutable economic truisms which he had gathered from his long
years of economic study... 'It is an immutable economic fact,' said the
general, 'that there is no such thing as a free lunch.'"



Tony Placilla, RHCT, GSEC
anthony_placilla at suth.com


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