I've registered an entry on the Giveaway List. I'm ready to give away 3 Linux CDs. I'm also a pretty prolific free-software author, GNU contributor, FAQ maintainer, co-maintainer of Sunsite, and (I think) all-around nice guy in your terms. (For details, see my home page given below.)

In general, I like your site a lot. I support what you're doing. But one thing on the site really annoys me. In your "reasons" page, you write:

• Giving something away is the ultimate subversive act in a society the economic system of which is structurally based on greed and egotism.

Love and altruism are wonderful, but they don't scale up well. So there is only one other kind of thing you can base a society on other than "greed and egotism", and that is the use of force to compel people to live in somebody else's One Right Way.

We know where that path leads -- straight to the gulags. I'd say that makes "greed and egotism" look pretty good, and I'll take the free market with all its warts over the whip and the gun and the horrible places altruism-by-force leads to.

Also, very pragmatically, societies that aren't driven by good healthy greed-and-egotism economies seldom have enough surplus wealth per head to enable charity.

And before you dismiss me as some conservative greed-head for saying these things, hear this: I've spent the last three years foregoing an income so I could volunteer my time to give free Internet access to poor people.

Please lose the anti-capitalist rhetoric. Let me suggest instead "Help show the world that mutual voluntary help works". That's what I'm doing.