On 12/22/2014 03:43 PM, Daniel Berteaud wrote:
Le 22/12/2014 12:56, Dave Liquorice a écrit :
IMHO if they are not putting anything back into SME be that via bug fixes,
development, NFRs or financially they are effectively stealing the code and
efforts of others.
No no no, and triple no !! ;-)
We release SME as free (libre) software, which includes several freedom
to the user, including using it without any counter part. If *we* give
something to someone, how could we possibly blame him to "steal" our
work, that makes no sense.
Fully agree.
Doesn't the licence have "non-commercial use only"
clause(s)?
No, that wouldn't be free software anymore, only freeware
Correct.
I don't have the magic solution to increase incomes, but I just think we
have to be careful with this kind of thing. I have no problem with
people making money out of free software (my own company does this) so
I'm clearly not against some commercial/professional side, but making it
mandatory to pay to use it have some serious issue:
- Privacy issue, as we require every one to create an account somewhere
- Technical issue: how do we enforce users are paying each year ?
- Legal issue: we can charge for downloading the ISO, but requiring a
recurrent fee seems border line to me with respect to the GPL (we could
get around it by cutting access to updates for account which haven't
paid though I guess)
But, doing so will probably reduce our user base. I for sure wouldn't
even bother to try an OS with such limitations. In fact, even a
registration being required to download the ISO is a deal breaker for me
There are many ways more we can generate some 'revenue' to cover
operational and survival costs. Paying for a product/service by the end
user is just 1 earning model.
I recently shared some raw idea's with John on how we can use a "pull"
model, instead of a "push" model.
Let's look at the assets we have for a minute here:
1. Pretty solid professional user base
2. Rock solid, secure and flexible all purpose business server, with an
impeccable history and track record
3. Pretty darn good documentation on SME Server, contribs and general
linux related to SME Server
4. 40K page hits per week for the wiki alone and I bet the forums add
another 40K. And since our content is very specific and topic related,
we safely can assume all hits are made by professionals that use SME Server.
5. We know what we are doing and are on top of things (see bugzilla)
So it appears to me we have some GREAT assets that we can market to the
right audience. And to me it seems that the right audience could be:
A. Sponsors from the IT market that want to promote their (HW) products
to be used with SME Server
B. Sponsors that want us to write a howto or make an RPM for a seemless
ntegration with SME Server
C. Sponsors that want to offer products that are compatible with SME
Server and can be order with a promocode, and a small percentage of the
sale is for SME Server
D. Sponsors that want to place a banner in general, or how-to page
specifically
E. Sponsors that can be listed with any press release (Hi Terry ;-) )
F. Sponsors that want to have a dedicated wiki page on how their
product/service is to the benefit of SME Server.
Just to name a few....
So 'we' need to re-think the old school earning model and take a look at
how to market what we already have established and will not costs us a
dime, nextto some organizational skills.
As for the users of SME Server, well, we will never be able to change a
certain mentality, other then kindly ask to donate, which we do already,
on many wiki pages and the server-manager. Doing more of this will get
greatly annoying.
Another possible idea would be to close the smetest repo for the general
public for a certain amount of time. Only paid subscribers will have
immediate access. Sounds fair to me and as Daniel indicated, we do not
have to publish any binary at all for free. Or a re-think of the repo's
in general based on subscription channels.
As for professional support, that's simple. We (as in community) can not
offer professional support, not even if one pays us to do so. We simply
lack the man power and organization. That's a huge gap and the
commercial minds amongst us can jump in there. But being listed as a
professional SME Server service provider, it will costs some money and
accreditation.
There's you food for thought ;-)
-HF
1. We can work with sponsors and partner
++
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