On the Free Software Ecosystem

Apparently some people concerned that recent donations to the Drupal project are being used to buy computers from Dell, an operation which has done relatively little to support open software. One of the Drupal-ers responded with a pretty coherent explanation of why they went with Dell, and the basic reason is simple:

Dell makes decent servers at a lower price than vendors like HP, Sun and IBM.

To me, it seems like they are pretty good stewards of the generous money donated to them: they made a good faith effort to buy the greatest capacity with the best reliability that they could afford. Computing power is a commodity item, and Dell would seem to be awfully hard to beat in that space. It would be a poor use of donations indeed to buy less capacity and less reliability, wouldn’t it?