On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 11:53:30AM -0000, John Woodard wrote:
On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 03:10:28PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
I found that domain registration via my ADSL ISP (UK Free Software Network) is prtty competitively priced so I'm registering the domains I want via them. If they do make any profit out of me then it supports free software.
Anything that supports free software gets the thumbs up from me.
You're not picky then. :) UKFSN is a special case, because they are explicitly setup to donate all profits to Free Software, but I think there are a reasonable number of ISPs who give back to the community in other ways.
For example Demon worked on a lot of bits for FreeBSD and Apache - they hit problems with their huge number of virtual hosts and produced the fixes and submitted them, at the very least, and I'm sure did a lot more.
Numerous ISPs support their local LUGs - php4hosting and Black Cat for ALUG for example.
Energis have a good causes rack - this currently has at least zenii.linux.org.uk and www.lug.org.uk in it.
I'm sure there are many other examples, it's just you often find that while it's accepted that staff will feed fixes back in or be allowed to work on bits during work time, it doesn't get publicised much. I know the Black Cat site doesn't list most of what we try to contribute back, which is something we're trying to remedy.
For example, Black Cat provide Debian with hosting for 2 of their machines (caballero & sarti). Both the owners are Debian Developers. We provide SPI with domain registration (spi-inc.org, oftc.net & debian.org are just some of the domains we hold for them). We've submitted patches or reported bugs and helped track them down for numerous projects (Apache, the Linux kernel, Quagga, l2tpns and LinuxBIOS at least).
UKFSN just have Free Software as one of their major selling points. Don't think the rest of us aren't trying to do our bit as well. ;)
J.