Just my $0.02: As a case study; up here in Canada we have an outdoor outfitters store called Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC). It is similar in structure to DUA that has been proposed in that to shop there you have to buy a five dollar membership, but with that membership you gain voting privileges for electing the board of directors. You can own as many shares as you want, but you only get one vote. Most of the coop's revenue is re-invested in environmental causes, expansion, and manufacturing it's own line of outdoor equipment. I shop there all the time because I know they'll only put equipment on the shelves that they _know_ works well, because it's in their mandate. They also have a mandate to avoid products manufactured in countries with dubious human rights records as well as invest a set percentage of all revenues in environmental preservation/restoration.
I believe this example has two relevant points: It demonstrates that it is possible to have a money-making organization that can have paid staff selling a product(s), but not stray from it's morals. Partly because it's mandated, and partly because of the organization of the directorships, but mostly because greed is essentially not a motivation for the company. It also demonstrates that this type of organization can be successful. MEC has grown from six people in a tent on a mountainside complaining about shoddy equipment, to a nation wide chain of stores that are continually expanding and improving in quality and diversity. All this while in a heavily competitive field against corporations such as LL Bean, Totem, Patagonia, REI and others. Some urls I highly suggest people read: The MEC rules of (co)operation: http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/mecrules.htm The MEC mission statement: http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/mission.htm And the brief history of MEC: http://www.mec.ca/coop/communit/about/history.htm I think a coop approach similar to this would be beneficial to Debian because it would allow the developers to get paid for their work, allow Debian to grow into a more mainstream OS (depending on the mandate of the organization), while still allowing the end user to have a lot of control over the condition of the product. IMHO, the beautiful thing about this is that being open source, if it doesn't work it's possible to just take the code and run, as it were. MBG -------------------------------- "Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here." -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
