How to support Free Software tips and tricks at Zona-M (or any other website!)

Keeping up and running a good website, regularly adding original, useful and easy to use content, is a difficult task that requires a lot of time and effort. As you can read on my online business card, over the years I have accumulated lots of experience and information about how Free Software works. With this website I intend to provide a useful service, for free, to all users of Free Software, by reformatting and publishing all those informations in a really usable way.

Frankly speaking, however, I won’t be able to do this if there won’t be some concrete return (relax, nothing big, really). Not in the long term at least. There are only so many hours in the day and I must pay the bills first, as everybody else.

How can I help?

You can contribute to keep this website up and running in any of the ways listed below. While you’re reading them, please do keep in mind that they apply to any independent website, not just this one.

  • Don’t use ad blockers: yes, advertising on web pages can be an hassle, but it can also be the only way many websites have to at least cover their hosting costs. So please think long and seriously before turning ad blockers on on this or any other website.
  • Please don’t copy unless it is really necessary: by default, everything on this website is Free as in Freedom, so you can do with it anything allowed by those licenses. This said, please understand by copying as-is (see below) what you find here somewhere else online, you may very well lower the number of visitors on this website, that is its long-term sustainability
  • Tell your friends about the useful stuff you find here
  • Tell me what you would like to find here

if you like the books listed in the left bar, buy them following the corresponding links (I earn a little fee when that happens) (coming soon) donate using the Paypal button in the same bar

Thank for your support!

Marco

What do you mean by “copying as-is”?

By “copying as-is” I mean copying as-is all the content of one page and pasting it from the first to the last word in another Web page, without any change or other addition, integration, incorporation in larger works, nothing. This kind of copying adds no value at all for society: you’re publishing online something that was already published online and accessible for free by everybody with an Internet connection.

Sometimes this only happens for vanity, to fill an otherwise empty blog. Sometimes it happens for greed: copying somebody else’s work in the middle of a pile of advertising banners is a very quick way to make some money without any work. These two are the kinds of copying that, for obvious reasons, I included in the Online Loser Guide.

Much more often, “copying as-is” happens by simple carelessness or enthusiasm: people copy whole Web pages into email messages or Facebook posts (even when a link would have been enough) because they like them and therefore want other people to see them. Even if no harm is meant, such practices may still lower the traffic to the original website, that is the revenues that allow it to exist: please always consider this before copying, from here or anywhere else.