I'm not looking for or expecting a concensus on this, but I'd be interested in people's thoughts relative to the attached message. This raises a number of difficult issues, and I'd be even more interested in people's thoughts on the larger issues.
--- Begin Message ---Good day. My name is Henti Smith and I'm in the process of starting up a little "geekware" online shop to cater for the public in South Africa That would like to wear clothing representing their geekness. With this I hereby ask your permission to use the your trademark and Logo to be printed and embroidered onto clothing and then sold for profit to the public. Our business plan includes taking a percentage of the profit and returning it to the community for the furthering of development of the community. If you choose not to accept the offer yourself a contribution to a project of your choice will be made in your name. If you have a licence policy or monetary contribution guidlines, we would be more then happy to negotiate a win-win situation Please can you respond with your views and judgement on the possiblity of this. Thank you -- Henti Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.geekware.co.za +27 82 958 2525--- End Message ---
msg11306/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
I know there is already some FlightGear stuff for sale and we haven't had a problem with this before, so I assume we wouldn't have a problem with a few more geek's proudly wearing our logo. The difference here is that they offer to contribute a portion of the sales back to our project. The question then is what do we do with the money? Who get's to hold onto it? Who decides how and when it is spent? Who arbitrates or decides ultimately what is fair? What kind of accounting/disclosure would there need to be? If we make things too complicated, who would have time to jump through all the hoops? Realistically we are probably talking a few hundred $$$ as an upper bound? (That's my guess anyway.) Even though we probably aren't talking about much money here, it might be nice to get some sort of infrastructure and understanding in place since this sort of thing could happen to us more in the future. In the past couple days, I've been talking a bit to someone at Linux Game Publishing. They are interested in helping us add some packaging polish (in the area of docs, box art, installation, gui, etc.) that would make this more of an attractive end user product, and then they hope to sell a multi-cd set which includes world scenery. Assuming this moves forward, they propose to share the profits 50-50 with us. I haven't a clue what kind of sales this might generate, but if you factor in that we can run on Windows and Mac, we have a large potential audience out there, and our project continues to become more and more interesting to people. If LGP wants to start throwing a slightly less trivial amount of money back to our project, then what do we do? Frankly, this sort of thing scares me a lot more than writing GUI's or speaking in front of a live audience. There is a potential to handle this very badly and make everyone mad at each other. There is also a potential to do a lot of good for the project and accelerate it's development. There will be plenty of time to discuss specific things that money could be spent on, and plenty of time to discuss exactly what might be fair or not fair. That could be appropriately done within the infrastructure we set up. But for now, I'm interested in dicussing how we might set up a frame work (that most people can live with) to accept, manage, and distribute a bit of money. Who has time to oversee this? Initially we are probably talking a few hundred $$$ even with the most optimistic outlook. But if the LGP thing works out, we might be talking a little more than that... (maybe / mabye-not???) I hate to get everyone riled up if none of this comes to pass (since these sorts of things have come and gone before.) But, the potential is there, and I'd like to be able and ready to deal with it when the time comes. Of course if everyone is happy with any money going straight into Curt's big screen TV fund, that would be a *lot* simpler in the long run. :-) I have a couple half baked thoughts, but I'll leave those for later in hopes of not slanting the discussion any more than I already have. :-) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org
