Re: [Fsfe-uk] Grants programme

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 12:48 +0000, Chris Croughton wrote:
> I think this is part of the problem.  The amount we have available
> isn't enough to make much difference to most developers[..]  At best
> it might buy some hardware.

Well, indeed.

When we started it, I actually thought that the hardware aspect would be
more popular than it turned out: I thought the amounts of money on offer
were perfect for buying a hacker some hardware, that they would then
reverse engineer/integrate/whatever so that it was usable on the free
software platform. They wouldn't necessarily profit from it, but I hoped
that there were people out there who would be willing and had the
skills, and by getting the hardware for them we wouldn't be leaving them
out of pocket.

Now obviously, that wouldn't work for nVidia cards or that kind of
complexity, but I thought that we could at least do something with
printers, sound cards, or PDA integration or something - but to be
honest, I don't think we got a single application like that.

Bastian's was close, because he wanted to do acceleration with a DXR3(?)
card, but it turned out those cards were no longer on sale and I think
we arranged supply of a second-hand one at no cost.

I don't know why it has turned out like this: I guess part of it is that
the more "important" hardware is stuff like nVidia cards, which we don't
really have a hope of funding support for (we couldn't afford the
lawyers for a start :), and for other hardware the market is so diverse
that we wouldn't make much difference.

Cheers,

Alex.