Gene Heskett wrote: > On Saturday 19 May 2007, Anne Wilson wrote: >> On Saturday 19 May 2007, Thomas Cameron wrote: >>> Mauriat M wrote: >>>> On 5/15/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>>> Yep. If half of the people who are willing to discuss the nature of >>>>> Fedora in length step further to actually contribute that would make a >>>>> pretty big difference but alas folks are more interested in calling it >>>>> unstable or wanting the distribution to including proprietary software >>>>> by default. >>>>> >>>>> Next time you want to complain ask yourself how much you have >>>>> contributed in anyway at all to a every growing collection of Free >>>>> software included in a distribution that you can get for free. That >>>>> includes a lot of work many of which is volunteer driven in maintaining >>>>> around 8000 packages, documentation, artwork, QA, release engineering, >>>>> infrastructure, marketing etc. >>>>> >>>>> You can choose to help. >>>> Must I contribute to expect a somewhat stable and useful general >>>> purpose operating system? >>> TANSTAAFL >> What the blue blazes does that mean? >> >> Anne > > Oh, my. Sad, even shocking my dear Anne. You just gave yourself away as being > someone who has never read one of sci-fi's more famous authors, one Robert A. > Heinlein, now deceased, who was rather fond of the expression, but I think he > borrowed in from Ernest Hemingway back in the dim mists of time now. > > What it stands for is the first letter of each word in "There ain't no such > thing as a free lunch" > Wonkipedia seems to indicate the original attribution (albeit not exactly as RAH wrote it) to Leonard P. Ayres "-- In 1950, a New York Times columnist ascribed the phrase to economist Leonard P. Ayres of the Cleveland Trust Company. "It seems that shortly before the General's death [in 1946]... a group of reporters approached the general with the request that perhaps he might give them one of several immutable economic truisms which he had gathered from his long years of economic study... 'It is an immutable economic fact,' said the general, 'that there is no such thing as a free lunch.'" Tony Placilla, RHCT, GSEC anthony_placilla@xxxxxxxx GPG-Key-ID: 1024D/C78F8B64 http://pgp.mit.edu Key fingerprint = A8D5 7AFF CE88 4179 C792 D9A9 F197 2A15 C78F 8B64
