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3rd party apps3rd party appsPosted Jun 25, 2004 1:38 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544)In reply to: 3rd party apps by ccyoung Parent article: Singapore to be 'port of call' for Linux (ZDNet) > there will be a lot of selfish a-h's to be sure This is a funny thing. I met an old friend recently who didn't like reading wikipedia because he said he'd never contribute back and he didn't want to be a sponge. I told him, please read wikipedia, please use free software. If you never give back anything, then we've lost nothing of value, but if no one uses wikipedia and free software then they have no value at all. The goal of GNU (and therefore GNU/Linux) is to give freedom to computer users. So if someone uses GNU/Linux, they have already contributed because they have advanced the goal of the GNU project. If someone is wants to repay the community with money, code, or political activism, that's a great. But if someone wants to use free software without giving back? That's okay too, the more the merrier, spread the freedom.
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contributing to Wikipedia, etc. Posted Jun 25, 2004 8:38 UTC (Fri) by ami.ganguli (guest, #9613) [Link] You might also tell your friend that he may in fact find himself contributing in some way. I was taking a Finance course a while ago and looked up some definitions on Wikipedia. One of them was incorrect and I fixed it. Not a huge contribution, be point is that I wasn't intending to contribute - I just saw a small detail that I could fix and I did. I'm sure there are thousands of other people who do the same thing, and the Wikipedia is better because of it. Same thing happened a few months ago with the Apache APR. I'm not really a contributer to the project, but I was using the library and realized I needed a small change. I coded it up and sent it to the maintainers. After a couple of small revisions it got in. Kind of cool. Now I can look at new versions of Apache and notice my tiny little bit of code is there.
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