Re: [Consortium] a few more rants...

Perhaps - but let me put it like this. The professional Linux audio market is currently so small as to be insignificant to a hardware company. We currently rely on good will to get any loan hardware or specifications. If a particular company wants to donate hardware worth thousands of dollars to a libre software developer, they won't expect it to be lost, damaged or sold on eBay. As for 'free work', we're not talking about taking bread out of developers mouths, since these companies probably aren't paying anyone for Linux support at the moment. Another consideration is this: many companies will have a budget for supplying hardware to third parties for review and test, but won't have one for third party tech support. It would therefore be much easier for that company to supply hardware. The value would also be greater than cash, since the hardware company doesn't have to pay retail price for their own equipment. Besides, the responsibility I was talking about was the responsibility of an individual to work with the community in return for having primary access to the hardware. If you want free stuff, it's only reasonable to make some commitment in return. Cheers Daniel