Hi Malte,
I think I am aware of everything your saying, and, I think you've mis-understood what I'm getting at.
I have no objection to people using open source without contributing.. thats part of the point after all.
I was really questioning whether grants to used in this way were the most *effective* way of increasing adoption.
You could argue that if somewhere was too poor to afford even a modest spec PC to run an instance on, then they are hardly likely to have an overwhelming need for such a sophisticated system. I'd suggest if they were in that much financial difficulty then perhaps there are other more pressing things they'd like to receive grants for?
But whatever the details of the issue, my positon was to suggest that if someones got cash to spend, is this the most effective way to increase adoption? And it was a question rather than an answer :o)
And also, I did relate this to the testing effort. We're being asked to look into getting some good testing going for dotLRN. I think this is a good next step, but I just don't go along with the 'pay people to use the software' approach. Surely if anything moves against open source principles its by a product evolving due to financial incentive, not on merit or peer review.
I appreciate all your comments and ideas about the other areas as well, but I doubt very much as to whether what your suggesting would stand up to any serious financial scrutiny. Therefore surely the 'main' gain would be the wider adoption/enhancement of the toolkit, not the potential commercial gain. And hence my point about shouldn't a grant come with conditions? I think you'd find this to be the case in most other circumstances. i.e. if you had a grant to improve a clubs sports faciltities, you would expect them to agree to make some kind of agreement about how those facilities could be used.
I still think it sounded like 'pay people to make them use it'. Which is marketeering, pure and simple, and therefore if I'm being asked to contribute, I just like to understand what it is I'm contributing to :o)
