What he said... Nicely put Bill. I can see both sides of the issue and the only positive outcome I see is that open source projects can benefit us all through the participation of brilliant minds in all parts of the world. But, again, the internet doesn't do "physical" very well, so I join in urging people to help out with chips, programmers, etc.. when possible. I know that when I have sent hardware to the 3rd world to support a good mind, I have been rewarded many times over. James Newton, PICList Admin #3 mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com 1-619-652-0593 phone http://www.piclist.com ----- Original Message ----- From: William Chops Westfield To: Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 12:08 Subject: Re: [OT]: The value of a donation I couldn't agree more with Roman's call to donate. I'm not completely sure how I feel on the issue of software piracy in poor countries. Certainly, they have a more legitimate excuse than those who have money. And I almost buy the argument that it doesn't hurt the company because they couldn't pay anyway. I think... What bothers me about using cracked software when you can't afford the real version is... There ARE cheaper software alternatives, and there ARE companies who have "non-comercial" and freeware versions of their software, and there IS freeware from all sorts of places (of widely varying quality, of course.) By using a cracked C compiler instead of JAL freeware or the free 16F84 version of ??'s C compiler , you are not only failing to support the vendor of the cracked software, but you are ALSO failing to support the authors and/or communities of the software that you CAN afford. The Microsofts of the world can probably survive cracked versions in the hands of poor software geniuses, but freeware survives ONLY on the basis of its continued use by a community, and usually on the feedback and contributions from that community as well. Cracking microsoft may be illegal, but failing to support the software that you CAN afford is just stupid... I also find it difficult to comprehend why someone "needs" a cracked microsoft word when we'd probably all be better off if they were creating plain ascii documents in a micro-emacs clone instead... BillW -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.