On 22/12/14 12:56, Dave Liquorice wrote: > On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 13:50:21 +0100, John Crisp wrote: > > The "donate" buttons don't work then? >
Yes, but I think I slightly confooosed u. I was actually talking more about the people who depend on this as they earn revenue from it e.g integrators. >> I do not believe that for many small users a direct compulsory charge >> would work, though I am open to comments on this ! > > With a single server in a SOHO enviroment and 4 regular users that would > depend on the charge. B-) I pay EUR10.00 (approx GBP7.00) per year for my > usenet feed from news.individual.net. GBP10.00 a year for SME would not be a > problem. GBP10.00 a month would make me think again... I do occasionally > help with coding and the wiki though. > Please don't take any of this personally as I know you do contribute :-) Indeed, you illustrate the problem and it is difficult to set a 'fixed' price a a result. Geographical economics make it even worse - GBP10 to you might be small change, to someone say in India it might be a months wages for all we know. A big company may think it is nothing at all. >> The people that we should be looking at working with are the >> professional integrators who actually rely on us for their business. > > 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. Doesn't the licence have "non-commercial use only" > clause(s)? > Basically GPL, so AFAIAA currently the answer is no. If it did have a commercial use clause then anyone using it, be that as integrator, SOHO business or whatever would fall under it. So everyone apart from Home users would effectively be 'stealing' it ! So it isn't 'stealing' as the licence allows them to do what they do. That's our fault (if there is one) not theirs. OK, that might not be popular in a moral context, and it may be felt that they have some responsibility to pay back somehow, but that is a different argument :-) The point I was trying to make is that they are more likely to contribute if there is some form of gain or benefit for them. >> I believe that we have to be much more supportive of integrators. >> >> Again, forcing them to pay is still not the way to go. However.... > > Chicken and egg, which came first? Without suppport, financial or otherwise, > from those *earning their living* on the back of SME the foundation is never > going to be able to afford to do very much. > Yup, and that was the point of my post. We are 'cash strapped' at the minute - enough to pay the basic bills, not enough to allow for some real investment in the distro to build things people want. >> We need to have some pages on the wiki for 'official supporters' and/or >> where integrators can advertise. > > I'm tempted to say why should the foundation promote the freeloaders? Is it > a safe assumption that this advertising would be paid for and at sensble, as > in commercialish, rates? > That was kind of the idea.... Again the problem is what is a commercial rate ? It can vary wildy from country to country. And if you are an integrator in say the US, do you want to be attracting support business in India? We have to keep this very simple as a result. I don't believe we give it to them for free, but should be open to the idea of them making a contribution to advertise their services - I am sure their will be users who will benefit from this as well. As I mentioned there are companies who are willing to work with us with partnerships like there used to be with Mitel, but we need some things in order ourselves first. > > "Great minds think alike" or is it "fools never differ". B-) LOL :-) > > Presumably the integrators have some programming skills and knowledge of SME > so they could provide some of that "professional support" as "payment in > kind". Not easy to administer and monitor though, did fixing Bug wxyz > *really* take 12 hours of a developer/programmers time? Yes, they may have, but the point is they may have the skills to install and configure but not have the skills to bug fix - that is a skill in its own right. And indeed, trying to quantify their work would be difficult. > > Possibly what is needed is some easy/simple means of people being able to > submit patches etc without haveing to scale the vertical learning curve of > CVS/Git/whatever, getting to grips with Bugzilla is quite enough... > I don't disagree that CVS/git or whatever are not the easiest places (I struggle but tend to get there). If you just stick to Bugzilla you can at least add patches there for devs to use without struggling with versioning et al. Yes, Bugzilla is not the easiest thing to use when you start, but if you know of a simpler alternative to this then let us know. We do need somewhere to track bugs. We do need some form of versioning. How we do that is open to debate. I would say that if someone is good enough to actually write a patch they probably know a bit about bug trackers at least. The problem tends to be with less experienced people who would probably do more with some encouragement if you can get them started. At the end of the day this is an interesting conundrum that we have to at least make an attempt to resolve. B. Rgds John Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to one and all. _______________________________________________ Discussion about project organisation and overall direction To unsubscribe, e-mail [email protected] Searchable archive at http://lists.contribs.org/mailman/public/discussion/
