Now that I have received some feedback, I need to clarify a few points about the credit program.

First, I am not making a judgment about the usability of the proprietary software. It may be better for you, it may run faster, jump farther, be the package you know, etc. The judgment is that it is not open source software. If you are perfectly happy forwarding the idea of proprietary software, and its cost, then you should not consider buying offset credits.

If the open source Community is important to you, and you would like to see it grow, then you should consider buying credits. Much the same way that buying Carbon offsets benefits the environment of Earth, buy PSC's will benefit the environment of computing.

I have seen, far to many open source advocates, that use .. daily .. proprietary source packages. They are caught between two worlds. Lets take a typical open source development project, say…. Ruby on Rails.

Rails is a great project. Open Source through and through. It has a thriving and growing community. More and more projects are turning to using it for their web-framework. Now, go pop into any rails forum and ask a question. The Mac pretentiousness oozes back at you. One would think that you can not actually write Rails code without a Mac, OSX, and textmate. In fact, can anyone find a screencast on Rails that is not done on a Mac using textmate? I for one, have been very successful writing Rails ( and Ruby ) using my Ubuntu system and Vim.

We have to give this whole type of user an outlet for providing back to the open source community which they use. To bring symbiosis to the relationship rather than having the open source picked over by carrion, only to be left aside when shiny proprietary software whispers sweet nothings…

The next post will contain the basic structure for calculating ones proprietary footprint, and how many credits will be needed to offset.

Oh, and you Mac guys that are dual booting Windows on top of a Mac …. shame on you.