Re: [gentoo-trustees] using the stable gentoo tree as a source of revenue

[Corey Shields]

On Sunday 08 August 2004 14:53, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> All --
>
> With the recent discussions on -dev about GLEP 19 and the proposed stable
> portage tree, a suggestion was made to charge for this service.  At first,
> I wasn't too keen about it, but as I thought about it, I realized two
> things:

Eh, the revenue would be nice, but I see problems with this (with another idea 
to follow):

1) This is what everyone else is doing, and it is driving customers away and 
towards our own distribution.  The customers that RedHat and SuSE are keeping 
are mainly those who are locked in to those distributions by a third party 
application that is only supported there.  Everyone else is running away from 
having to pay for an enterprise system like that.  Without the third party 
applications, I doubt they would have much success with their enterprise 
products at all.

2) Support..  This is another point at which RedHat and SuSE can win customers 
with their EL's.  They guarantee a certain level of support (quick bug fixes 
and technical support) that we can not guarantee with our distribution.  We 
can make claims based on our community track record, but we can't give it the 
guarantee that the others do.

3) Liability:  The minute we charge for a product becomes the point that we 
are liable for it's existence and reliability.  Buyer's expectations will be 
higher because they are paying for it.

4) QA: I don't see our QA being good enough to charge for it yet.  Even if it 
improves, we end up looking like a Fedora-RedHat setup.  Many Fedora ppl are 
beginning to realize that they are RedHat's free labor.


Basically, I want to stay away from giving a group of "paying" people 
exclusive access to a product.  That plan has been tried over and over and 
from what I can see hasn't proved itself successful in the open source world 
yet.  Why not come up with something new?  I think we can make enough revenue 
for the foundation without having to do that.  At one point the idea came up 
to have a set of mirrors (rsync, source, whatever) exclusively for "paid" 
people.  I am much more inclined to that because non-paying people can still 
have access via other means, whereas the original suggestion is to make an 
"enterprise" version of Gentoo for paying customers only.

Let's leverage the community.  Try something new.  People don't mind donating, 
and one of the audience at our keynote made an interesting point that he is 
subscribed in a way to make annual donations to some society (Audobahn 
maybe?), and that it is all automatic.  In the same sentance he said he 
wouldn't mind doing that with Gentoo.  I kind of like the idea of setting up 
monthly and/or annual "donation subscriptions" for people to sign up for.  
Personally, I wouldn't mind donating $5 a month to the foundation if it were 
an automatic process.  That ends up being $60/year which gets close to what 
some distros charge for a personal copy of Linux, yet when it is spread out 
over a monthly schedule doesn't seem like much at all.  A business may be 
able to donate $50/month, or make it an annual donation of $600/yr.  I 
believe this would bring in revenue, the 2 points Kurt pointed out in his 
post.

I don't know whether it would bring in more or less revenue than selling a 
gentoo enterprise, but we know that our user base is growing (the forums 
userbase alone is growing almost 75 people a day).  I think that over the 
long term, having a growing userbase where a small percentage donate 
regularly would outweigh having an exclusive product to sell that carries 
with it a lot of risks (one being the community itself).

We could even combine some ideas and offer an exclusive rsync ring and source 
mirror to the donors.

This idea may not work, I would just like for us to think of something new and 
unexclusive before trying to sell a version of Gentoo.

Cheers!

-C

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