Le 2010-12-26 09:27, Tom Davies a écrit : Hi Tom:
Our competitors are selling their product for about $50 per unit and many people would say that by selling for less we are saying our product is worth that much less. Their logic is that if product A costs $50 then it is worth $50 and if product B sells at $5 then product A is 'obviously' the better product. Selling the product for $1.25 is insultingly low and really says the product is not really worth buying at all! The Free Software Foundation is not against people selling or profiting from Free/OpenSource software. The GPL is not against it either. The caveat is that when the product is sold (or even given away) the potential recipient is given the address of where they can get a copy of the Source Code. Personally i would tend to go further and give them the address of where they can download the product for free. When selling the product it would be ideal if the 'vendor' could keep a fair profit in addition to covering costs. How else are we going to get established distribution networks to sell the product? If established retailers are never going to sell the product then what other distribution networks are we going to use? Perhaps we should rely on drug-dealers or some similar dodgy-looking network to take care of pushing our product for us! Yes, ideally some of that money would go back into TDF but at the very least some needs to cover the costs, including time& effort, storage and all the rest of the costs that people don't notice when they are committed to to fighting for a good cause. I would say $5 or even $10 is about right, or £5 or £10 in the Uk. It is just enough to make people realise that it is a legitimate product without being as much as the market would be willing to spend if they realised how good the product is. Regards from Tom :)
I also agree with this. We should at least cover the cost of S/H as well as work some profit into the sale. Some of the profit should go back to the TDF but the profit could also be added to the use of the machines to copy which will also need to be replaced at some point ... sort of an amortization cost for the hardware.
As Tom points out, there is also the look of software legitimacy. I can see a low sell cost if there are multiple DVD requests from one particular individual or of special circumstances where a low sell point is establish to "seed" a particular region on the map or for some kind of financial concern for a particular group or region.
BTW ... there is a thread on the German list re: a DVD design. Jens has proposed a design and it can be found here: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/User:JeHa. The thread can also be found here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.documentfoundation.libreoffice.discuss.german/1441. I like the design for its simplicity and it will also look nice using Lightscribe for burning the DVD label.
BTW ... there is a wiki page for DVD suppliers and this can also be found here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.documentfoundation.libreoffice.discuss.german/1441 If anyone is interested in becoming (unofficially) a supplier, feel free to add your name to the list. I believe that the official list will be establish later on after discussion.
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