[gentoo-dev] Gentoo subscriptions ideas

[COFFMAN Steven]

Hi,

There's something to be said for not making your hobby your job, but I was
idly thinking of what value paid subscriptions could add to Gentoo to
support development of the completely free version.

A Gentoo subscription might allow access to pre-compiled, optimized binaries
for free-but-closed source software like NVIDIA drivers for common
architectures. Nvidia might even pay Gentoo to do it for them.

Further, Gentoo subscribers might have the option to buy optimized binaries
for unfree software like Ximian Connector, Star Office, Doom III, etc. Loki
couldn't make a profit by licensing the closed source for porting, but maybe
for software that's already on Linux with Gentoo-the-company acting more as
a software reseller and consultant it might work.

A subscription would also probably get the obvious things like:
Subscriber-only mirrors
Ebuild compilation progress bars (based on how long similar machines took)
Precompiled binaries for common architectures/options (like KDE on Athlon)
A stuffed Gentoo cow mascot :)
GUI Portage

I don't know if there's even a problem with developers supporting themselves
outside of donations, but in case they were scrounging for cash.
-Steve
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