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

[Deedra Waters]

I like corey's idea of donating more. When kurt mentioned paying for a
stable tree, redhat/fedora instantly came to mind.

I think that corey is right though, if an automatic donating system so
to speak was set up, I think more people would go for that. I know I
would, and probably others.


On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Corey Shields wrote:

> Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 15:35:05 -0500
> From: Corey Shields <cshields@g.o>
> Reply-To: gentoo-trustees@l.g.o
> To: gentoo-trustees@l.g.o
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-trustees] using the stable gentoo tree as a source
>     of revenue
>
> 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
>
> --
> gentoo-trustees@g.o mailing list
>

-- 
Deedra Waters - Gentoo developer relations, accessibility and infrastructure -
dmwaters@g.o
Gentoo linux: http://www.gentoo.org


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