Joe Very well put.
For my 2c worth I might perhaps go somewhat further [and at a bit more length]; from the perspective of end customers [in other words /our/ customers] there is a major issue surrounding /any/ FOSS product that targets a business critical area such as the NAS/SAN sector. One is - in effect - asking the customer to bet the future of their business/organisation on the integrity and robustness of the tool one is recommending [Let's not get into discussion about this being true for many other common products - we may know this but the important point is that it's what such customers perceive to be true]. Whilst products such as e-NAS, EMC/Clarion, and the like aren't cheap they are mostly just plug and go, with a relatively well known 'name' and a fairly high level of street cred to back them up, and with a fairly global coverage of support and service etc. Recommending and supporting such products falls into the old "No-one got fired for buying IBM" zone. OF doesn't [yet] have that presence and reputation in the wider world - which makes the risks perceived by potential customers even higher. No matter what levels of support we as vendors and the OF dev team might provide, it's that customer inertia that has to be overcome. On the one hand a paid for support scheme /may/ be a reassurance to customers; on the other hand it can also seem highly premature. I'm very sympathetic to Rafiu and the team's objectives for the product but I'm highly sceptical about the commercialisation of a product [or more properly the services surrounding the product] so early in the development cycle. The short answer is that the annual [or even one-time] value to any customer of any such support offering is in direct proportion to the value of the data which will be stored and accessed on OF and the business or organsiation's dependency on that data. Which is why companies such as OnTrack and Vogon can charge very large fees for recovering such data. Many here are techies and could probably cope with problems, with some prompting and help from others in the group. However for OF to be truly commercial it would need to be out there in userland alongside MySQL and Apache et al: that's a place where the user may not be especially techie but simply wants the features and facilities OF can offer. Such users won't jump to use OF in the present circumstance because the product is 'unproven' and the fixes/solution & docs etc are still "too techie" [note that this isn't especially a crit, it's mostly the nature of the product itself]. In short, for end users' it's a risk/reward calculation that [I believe] doesn't currently support a subscription model. That balance can only be changed by making OF easier to use with other OSs [Windows etc] and much more robust and much better documented so that end users can support themselves more easily. If Rafiu is suggesting a subscription model for us techies and/or resellers only [rather than for end user customers] then that's never going to generate sufficient income to cover costs; the target has to be direct revenues from end users - and that in turn means generating perceived values and advantages which don't yet exist. Robert. _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
