From: "Marcos Rubinstein - ALPA WWW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > dongle? does idaya understand that many, many of us rent > servers from somebody else?... (imagine the hassle on > sending the dongle to the co. you rent the server from, and, > how much more difficult would be when you want to change > provider!!!!)(BTW.. I like to rent servers instead of > colo... because, at least in theory, the co. will be able to > change anything that goes south much faster!) >
I think the important thing to understand now is that ProVSD is aimed at a different market than freeVSD -- a market which is probably not represented well, if at all, on this mailing list. I'm sure Idaya have done research and determined that there are companies looking for a product like ProVSD and willing to pay the price they're asking. They also presumably have a good grasp of the legal issues with freeVSD, ProVSD and the GPL and have determined that they can legally do what they're doing. I'm not a lawyer so I haven't the expertise to argue that point. > > it seems that besides the fact that idaya is changing the > form of web distro of freevsd (from tar.gz to CVS), it > remains committed to freevsd. > That, I think is the really important question now. They want to make money from ProVSD; what is the benefit to them in continuing to maintain freeVSD, as an open source project? If I understand it correctly, they can't take any user contributions to freeVSD and integrate them into ProVSD, and the only way they can make any money from freeVSD is through sales of the CD-ROM, which the response on this list has shown clearly is not going to be popular (with the segment of the userbase represented here, at least). Hence, it's not clear to me how freeVSD fits into Idaya's business plans. Unless they can build freeVSD up into a large scale OSS project and gain from it through publicity and selling services like commercial support, I cannot see the benefit to them in continuing with it. > > The other option that we, as member of the open source > community have, is to "branch out" ... we could take freevsd > as it is right now... and create, as somebody else said, > Rfreevsd. I would rather not. But if there is a need, I'm > willing to rent a cheap server for the distros, mailing > lists, and so on! (also, I do have a neat idea of how > promote a Rfreevsd GPL and make some money at the same time > ;)(but... lets wait and see idaya's next step ;))) > Yes, I think that if Idaya were to stop maintaining freeVSD then the community here should fork the project and maintain it ourselves. However, right now I don't think that would be the ideal thing to do, since Idaya haven't stopped yet -- if I'm not mistaken, Idaya have people working on freeVSD pretty much full time, putting a lot of effort into it, which I think the community would be hard pressed to match, at its current size. I know that I for one have many other tasks to worry about, and as such would only be able to contribute a few hours a week to a VSD project, as much as I might want to dedicate all my time to it! So for now, unless Idaya come out and tell us what they're thinking, I will take a "wait and see" approach. Simon ------------------------- The freeVSD Support List -------------------------- Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=subscribe%20freevsd-support Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=unsubscribe%20freevsd-support Archives: http://freevsd.org/support/mail-archives/freevsd-support -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
