[ale] Money for the cause

[David Hillman]

Our Untangle gateway box is running great.  That project gained my support
in a big way.  Being the idealist that I am, I usually try to go with more
"open" technologies here at work (when it makes sense).  Recently, I have
been seeing a lot more projects asking for donations, like it has become a
struggle.  I donate money whenever I can.  It's just too much to donate to
everything that we use, but I try.  Sometimes I get resistance because a lot
of the people that I work with are only willing to deal with established
companies.  It must be all the free gifts they get.  If it isn't, why do we
have a project involving Oracle stack that is screwed all to hell right now?
 It has totally blown the budget in a big way.  We seem to be pouring money
into a big pit to fix every little thing with no end in sight.  I figure if
I can't convince people to sign on with open source companies for those
projects, maybe I can find ways to purchase hardware from companies that are
friendly to the idea of open source.  We bought nothing but Snapgear
firewall boxes since 2002 and then continued to do so until their parent
company, Secure Computing, was bought by McAfee.   Snapgear was always nice
enough to publish great specs and provided (almost) complete source code for
their devices.  It always felt like we were buying a kit that just happened
to be sold by a fairly large company.

I found out later that Secure Computing's web filter software was in use by
the Iranian government to block their citizens from accessing websites.
 Secure Computing has also been known to actively bid for contracts from
other repressive regimes in the Middle East.  They claimed to not be
responsible for how their customers used their products.  Maybe it wasn't
all about the money then.  Still, so many of those companies pretend to be
nice, when they are not.  Is it even important to care what a company does,
as long as they provide a warranty and a device that runs well enough?  How
about having access to the specs and source code?  You end up getting
disappointed on either side of the fence.  What's an idealist to do?  Sit on
the fence?
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