What your implying is extremely ignorant, offensive, and just plain wrong.
Trisquel doesn't raise enough funds to cover trips for its lead developer to
LibrePlanet let alone pay the lead developer. To say its somehow egregiously
taking advantage of its users is wrong. The only people who would make such a
claim don't understand what free software is or the reasons it exists.
The reason for replacing hardware is purely down to non-free software issues
created by companies which think that they are gaining an advantage by
keeping code secret. It's not just drivers and firmware that are removed from
Trisquel. It's everything that is under a non-free license and any bits of
code which link to or point out non-free software. Trisquel follows the free
software's distribution recommendation guidelines and avoids promoting
non-free software in any way, shape, or form. The project gets no money from
the Free Software Foundation either. None of these decisions have had
anything to do with fund raising. If Trisquel were purely about financial
interests it would not be excluding non-free software. The exact opposite
would probably be true. The leading distribution is hardly a 'free software'
project, but it is significantly better off with sufficient finances to pay
several full time developers.
I'm the CEO for ThinkPenguin and I can tell you whats been raised
(approximately, it's public already). It's been a mere few thousand US
dollars at best, from Trisquel/ThinkPenguin relationships, but to make a
point, most of the money Trisquel's raised has been through direct donations
and its associate membership program. The real value here is for the users as
it reduces the amount of non-free software one is dependent on.
