On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 05:40:15PM -0400, Louis A. Mamakos wrote:
>
> > I was thinking about this the other day. I don't think there's very
> > much money likely to be made in "value-add" CD distributions in the
> > near future -- that requires hard work to add value, and that requires
> > someone being paid to do it.
>
> The value-add may have nothing to do with the contents of the CD's. Consider
> that having a well-run subscription service might be valuable, or perhaps
> better physical packaging in other than the standard jewel boxes.
>
> Or adding some addition disks as part of the set of other useful software
> or documentation. Perhaps providing sets of pre-built picobsd
> distributions with floppy images? Maybe with hardcopy versions of
> the handbook or other documentation. Or perhaps someone with
> phone-in tech support to help people install, run and support FreeBSD.
>
> There's a number of different price points and and value propositions
> you could shoot for. The tricky bit is finguring out which of the
> alternatives people want. :-)
Yeah, and these all cost money, and are limited-appeal, so they're
likely to not make much money, especially if there are other vendors
doing similar things. The other side of the coin which I didn't
mention is that the FreeBSD distribution market probably isn't big
enough to support more than one or two vendors. To some extent that's
not our problem, unless they all collapse except for the bare-bones
vendors like CheapBytes who don't do anything to directly help the
project, in which case we've screwed ourselves out of funding.
Kris
PGP signature
