"Jordan K. Hubbard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>Once you add up his full benefit package (medical, dental, 401K,
>insurance, etc) and salary, it still takes another 1199 of you to pay
>for the rest of him just through buying CDs at full price, three times
>a year.
[...]
>To summarize, it counts, but not nearly enough to make it a meaningful
>answer to the quoted paragraph. Without one hell of a lot of
>volunteers working very very hard, each and every open source project
>out there would sink tomorrow if it had to switch to CD revenues as
>the sole method of making technical, and many other forms of,
>progress.
Which is exactly as I thought, but there are three points I'd like to make,
the above notwithstanding:
1. The other 1199 new FreeBSD CD-ROM customers you need to get, are they more
likely to be CVSUPping, mailing-list tracking, make-worlding-since-2.0.1
experts, or are they likely to be complete newcomers to the FreeBSD
experience? Or, to put it another way, where are you planning to grow
your market?
2. Pending market growth, there are limited commercial funds available for
discretionary expeditures. Priorities need to be set. Is ensuring that
the product documentation documents the product one of these priorities?
If not, see point 1.
3. This particular problem does not require a high-skill, high-cost
developer. If you hired a moderately intelligent and responsible
high-school student to clean up the handbook over summer vacation,
once a year, with follow-up on weekends, it would be a significant
improvement over the current situation and would set you back all of
(3*120+9*16)*$10.00=$5,040/year, plus FICA, etc. Now, you're down to
a few hundred CD's to cover the cost. There is a problem. If you don't
have an elegant hack handy, an ugly hack is better than no hack at all.
-Michael Robinson
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