On 3/10/06, Diana Eichert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Talk is really cheap. Getting a business, either the one you work for or > a vendor, to donate hardware or funding is much harder.
Right. Because for-profit businesses wants to see return on their "investment", thus a company will seldom give stuff away because it feels good. > So instead of TALKING about it what you MIGHT do, go out and find > equipment/funding from somewhere. Once you get something concrete > notify Theo of what you have. This process works. I'm working right now to donate hardware (mostly for Todd and Marco). About to ship the small stuff (SCSI and FCAL gear), but it's non-trivial to convince a Fortune 500 to "donate" anything without even getting a tax write-off in return. For example, two of our sites are upgrading all Mac desktops to G5, literally throwing away dozens of functional Mac G3s, because there is a very short list of tax-deductible charities to which the Company authorizes donation, and it's just easier to send the hardware to the shredder. Last year I gave ten weeks of electricity for the machine room to OpenBSD. Meanwhile my employer bought exactly *two* CDs, and I had to push for that. Kevin Kadow