How to help / support Linux ? - your idea's

[deanjo]

That would one in a year distribute the gathered recurses to the software developers based on the popularity of the software.

Nice idea but the problem with that it doesn't help get projects established. It is a "the rich get richer and the poorer stay poor" scheme. Canada imposed a levy like that on CD media that was supposed to help out music artists. Unfortunately the only ones that see any kind of dividend is the already well established artist while the up and comers and smaller artists get nothing.

[FarmVille]

Regarding

farmville sunflower
I now have the largest possible farm which is the plantation, the best vehicles, decorations and the ultimate goal of the $1,000,000 villa. In fact, I used to share my farm info right here on this page so I could talk to other gamers like you.

[schmidtbag]

ok so i read the first 2 and last 2 pages of this thread and found that "thatguy" was being argued with throughout the topic, and the actual thread is being ignored.

i didn't read everything that everyone said, but thatguy isn't completely wrong. it is true, companies do not want to work on linux because its not centralized. they don't like how if they make something for 1 distro or desktop environment, it won't work on another without a little effort. as a developer, i personally don't think its THAT hard to deal with, but i have made a program that works in every desktop environment except kde, so this IS an issue.
so i agree with the idea that there should only be a handful of distros - less than 10 (with the exception of ones such as partedmagic, clonezilla, or any demo distros like knoppix) and there should be metapackages designed for a core distro as a replacement. for example, debian could be the core distro and you could add ubuntu repositories and install an ubuntu metapackage. this would all be available in the installer before any changes are made.

also, terminal is incredibly necessary and is one of my favorite tools, but theres a little too many programs that NEED it and could effortlessly have a gui alternative, and thats where i come in to contribute to this topic:

like mentioned before, i'm a developer. other than making games on my free time, i've created a handful of multi-distro simple graphical tools where there is no graphical interface available (unless only designed for 1 DE), or where the only graphical tool(s) available aren't working to my standards. heres some examples of what i've made:

auto-dpkg - tool for non-gnome DEs to quickly install .deb packages
deskgen - desktop icon creator for LXDE (i'm probably going to update this)
gngb-gui - tool to configure and select ROMs for gngb (a game boy emulator)
super-udf - tool to create .iso images with files larger than 2gb
Device Power Control - tool to quickly and easily mount a device and power it on, or unmount a device and power it off - great for eSATA drives.
NV Chart - nvidia gpu graphing monitor, similar to gkrellm. this can graph gpu usage, vram usage, temperature, and fan speed (as a %) and tells you live clock speeds.

i only make tools to suit my needs when i encounter them, but this is my way of contributing to linux. unfortunately, i'm not sure how to get my programs out there.

[deanjo]

i only make tools to suit my needs when i encounter them, but this is my way of contributing to linux. unfortunately, i'm not sure how to get my programs out there.

Putting them up on something like sourceforge or googlecode would be a start.

[deanjo]

You could also package them for various distros and distribute them on openSUSE's build service.

[schmidtbag]

Putting them up on something like sourceforge or googlecode would be a start.

nv chart is on sourceforge, and this other program i made (that works with fingerprint readers) that is irrelevant to the topic is also on sourceforge. but i feel like thats not enough.

[crazycheese]

What open source community really needs is a One Dollar License. To put it bluntly users should be required to pay a minimum of one dollar a year (or if the can more but the one dollar is a minimum) to the Free Rights Management Foundation That would one in a year distribute the gathered recurses to the software developers based on the popularity of the software.

So:
1. Developers register with The foundation that they use the License.
2. Users buy the license from the foundation, and receive a license key.
3. Installed applet check the software installed on a mashing and uploads statistics (only the software protected by the license is counted, other is ignored.)
4. Once year the numbers are crunched and the money is allocated respectively.
5. The money should be divided in 3 categories 20% for Linux distributions, 30% Drivers, 50% Software. (Within those categories money divide is based on the popularity.)
6. Since companies usually can pay more The licence fee should be divided:
Home users $1+ / for all.
Enterprise $1+ / for every 10-15 workstations.

This wont work.
- Money is not put on specific target, but is granted to some organisation "in advance".
- License overhead and its essence crap
- Polarization around one entity instead of targeted spread
- Many many people do not have 1$, do not wish to spend $1 for sake of "support" instead of return or need $1 to pay food. Rich will laugh, able will question the reasoning, poor will not be able to manage it.

People are really really stupid beings that prefer to pay reasonable price for the job be done and they not going with their head into that; and they love colorful stupid slogans (Lookup ubuntu marketshare - they are barely inventing anything, but "talk talk talk").

Sorry, my opinion. Not that this is to stop you. But you might one day recieve a hatemail from RMS.

[deanjo]

nv chart is on sourceforge, and this other program i made (that works with fingerprint readers) that is irrelevant to the topic is also on sourceforge. but i feel like thats not enough.

Then put up a package repository like I suggested here:

You could also package them for various distros and distribute them on openSUSE's build service.

[PsynoKhi0]

One thing would be for users not to bail out as soon as a piece of hardware/software isn't supported in Linux.

Find other people having the same issue and collectively contact the manufacturer.

[schmidtbag]

One thing would be for users not to bail out as soon as a piece of hardware/software isn't supported in Linux.

Find other people having the same issue and collectively contact the manufacturer.

well thats like saying someone is in the middle of a gun fight and just decides to run away because they don't feel like being killed - not everything is the right choice for everyone. linux isn't the best os for the average person and if they're caught in an unexpected mess then they're not going to waste time trying to fix something they know nothing about.

manufacturers don't usually make the drivers for linux, so they don't have a way of helping anyone. video cards and some wireless cards are really the only common drivers made by the manufacturers. you idea isn't a bad one but remember that one of the greatest weaknesses of linux is a lack of professional and/or dedicated support.