I don't really need another email account but the discounts look to be well worth the $250 and the email address would be a cool (if slightly geeky) bit of cyber-bling.

"People forget, because Linux is such a successful commercial platform, that it also represents a real social good"

It plants trees, eradicates poverty, cleans water, cures malaria and cancer...

By extending the life of your computing hardware and not diverting society's economic resources unnecessarily into purchasing software produced for marketing reasons and itself requiring extra hardware, you will indeed be freeing up resources for tree planting,k eradicating poverty, producing clean water, curing malaria and cancer..."

The one you missed out (a simple oversight on your part, I'm sure) was that by extending the life of the hardware Linux also directly contributes to reducing landfill

Surely anyone who is sad enough to want an @linux.com email address,

by definition,

won't have any friends,

so they don't really NEED an email address in the first place ....

Actually, FOSS saves lives, and may well be involved in tree planting, poverty eradication, water cleaning etc. IT is useful - FOSS means that usefulness is available to anyone with a 10-year-old PC, an internet connection and some time to learn.

Do some googling. FOSS made itself very useful in the aftermath of the December 2004 Asian Tsunami. See also Schoolnet Namibia and countless other examples.

Something that some registration companies provide for free then but with multiple email addresses at a domain - you just need to register the domain for around a tenner. So ummm.. let me think about this...

Are those discounts available world wide? Can you use them via web purchases? Do you have to go direct to the vendor when you could buy kit cheaper elsewhere anyway?

I'm a Linux fanboy my self but those benefits need expanding on.

"you will indeed be freeing up resources for tree planting,k eradicating poverty, producing clean water, curing malaria and cancer..."

Is there a GNOME version of Eradicating Poverty ?

I really need _another_ email address because the address I've been using for 15 years -- the one that all my friends and family know -- all the sudden I need to change that.

And I can be neighbors with Linus and Maddog too. Oh wait, they probably have other email addresses that they use.

It'll be amusing to see which sycophants get and actually use a linux.com address.

fail, Epic. As far as I'm concerned.

To register billg@linux.com. You know it makes sense.

Excellent. Took me a couple of seconds to work out what you were talking about :)

It might even have been a freudian slip, since I only use KDE

sudo apt-get install eradicating-poverty

Sorry, it's CLI only. The GUI is far too opulent.