Personally, I make no distinction or harbour any prejudice between all the forms of commercial endeavour - whether commercial products or commercial services, whether commercial software or ancilliary commercial services.
I make my money by offering software and ancilliary *services*. However, I bear no animosity towards those selling software *products*. I also do NOT subscribe to GNU view that the world of software should only be services oriented and nobody should be selling products. As far as I know, ILUGD has already set a precedent, by allowing certain non-Free commercial publishers to actually *promote* their books at an ILUGD meeting. Ironically, that meeting was held at Sudhir's office only. The publisher representatives were told of offering their books through GNU FDL by Raj, to which they said that they would "get back on that". BTW, what ever happened to that? Trinity? I believe that while commercial interests are not given primary importance in meets (e.g. like holding a special XYZ software ILUGD meet), giving them a platform from time to time to announce their wares, should not be a problem. We allow them a similar platform on mailing lists using the [COMMERCIAL] tag, don't we? We do help developers/admins at firms making closed source products on the list, don't we? On the brighter side, we can get them to sponsor the eats at the meeting perhaps. :) (Now you know my vested interest in the topic ;) Personally, I believe this is a Linux USER's Group. If it had been a Linux philosophy group, or just a GNU group, perhaps apart from me a lot of people would have been missing over here. We believe in promotion of Linux in all forms. More commercial software on Linux would mean more people using Linux and more people seriously searching for other apps on Linux, which in turn is going to be mostly OpenSource. So everybody gains. Perhaps some people fear that Linux might be in the danger of being flooded with closed-source commercial goods. I don't have such a fear. If a commercial product is successful enough, one can be rest assured that someone will come up with a OpenSource alternative. Among all this, Linux wins because all these apps are going to be running on it! So we are all happy! - Sandip At 02:41 AM 8/29/2002 +0530, you wrote: >Hello Amit, > >Since I was not trying to promote the software through this offer, that >does not remain an issue at all. -- Sandip Bhattacharya sandipb <@> bigfoot.com http://www.sandipb.net ================================================ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in subject header. Check archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd%40wpaa.org
