Graham Lauder wrote: > In a phrase: Horse Doo doo [....] > Mageia has a donation system >
[....] > We do this because at the end of the day infrastructure costs, marketing > costs, a whole pile of things cost. One day some patch or application, which > is essential but completely non-sexy could require us to pay a dev on > contract > and so on and so forth. > > Now our problem is that in these days of "everything free off the Internet" > getting Koha is problematic. However there is, obviously, a proportion of the > market that is willing to give Koha. That proportion in a market is > generally > but arguably fixed, so the bigger the market the greater the Koha. Our > advantage is that our "costs" vary little with the size of the market. > I'm not exactly ignorant of Economics 101, having been in this business (on the commercial side) for about 35 years. :-) You make my point exactly. The infrastructure costs are fixed, and the donor pool will be larger if the user base is larger. You can either choose to entice people to donate because of their perception of the slant (market vision) of the distro, or you can entice people to donate because they find the distro useful to them personally (otherwise known as pseudo-shareware). If you narrow the audience using the former approach, you're excluding potential contributors. I was a member of Mandriva Club for years because I thought Mandriva worth supporting; I never bought a PowerPack or a Box Set because I never needed that stuff. If MDV had trumpeted itself as a KDE-only Family (or Education, or whatever) distro, and reinforced that by excluding packages and infrastructure support for other stuff, I wouldn't have given a dime. > There is already a way of doing that, it's called OBS (OpenSUSE Build > service, > it's free software, install it or in fact use it) and with that and SUSE > Studio, OpenSUSE have that corner of the market targeted and nailed. > Except that they don't have the tools that we have. The software packages are common to every distro. The tools aren't. The key to whether someone would use OBS or ours (or even OBS ported to use our packages) is the quality of the packages (currency, stability) and the quality of the distro tools. "Focus" is all about excluding "non-essential" activities so that a company can focus its limited resources on the desires of a specific market. A community distro is about servicing the largest possible community and providing a base from which others (including ourselves) can specialize. The assumption is that the community will supply the manpower needed to achieve the objectives they want achieved, and if you think that the potential developer contributor pool gives a rat's whatever about targeted "image" distros that don't satisfy their specific needs, then you don't know developers. And I would seriously question the assumption that 20-something families looking for commodity computing are going to become a significant donor base; that might happen if they were required to pay for it up front, and if their desire to buy it was great enough, but if they can get it and install it for free, they're outta there after that. Your contributions are going to come from people who have a longer-term view or an investment in the health of the distro. Cheers, Frank _______________________________________________ Mageia-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.mageia.org/mailman/listinfo/mageia-dev
