Hi Aral, On 10/20/06, Aral Balkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > As of now, I am going to be devoting myself to developing an engine > to power an open source web site similar to SourceForge but much > simpler to use. It has automated project signups, etc., and the core > functionality from the current solution. OSFlash will become one > category (the Flash category) under the projects that are hosted > there (alongside other Adobe and non-Adobe projects.) In order to > make it possible for me to work on this and pay the rent, I am going > to create a separate site that uses this engine which will host > commercial projects for a fee. Finally, if companies want to use this > engine, they'll be able to buy licenses for it and/or buy it as an > appliance. This should make it financially feasible for me to work on > OSFlash full time. > > What does everyone think of this? >
maybe what I experienced those last month can help a little my case was that doing basic freelance work in flash etc. most of the time every single client didn't have something as Trac+Subversion, but once they experienced it they just wanted exactly the same thing for almost all their projects but didn't want to go all the trouble to install it themselves. At first I was hosting all that just on mix of VPS + home DSL, then got problem with both the VPS plan and the DSL, then decided to go on my own dedicated server. My plan was the same, host open source projects for my stuff and for other people that might be interested, but have an automated tool that do just that automate stuff because yes it take a hell lot of a time... This is very recent but here are some results after ~1 months -> the automated stuff take more time than I thought, I should have planed more time for it, not even remotely finished as I would want, so I set up to have automated stuff on batch script level and see later how I can have cool web admin and sleeping at the same time... -> strangely, clients talk to each other, and most of the time new clients come ask me to host their Trac+SVN without me even needing to look for new clients, which is something I didn't planed at all. -> you need a very small set of paying client to cover for the cost of the dedicated server, but even if this is cool this is not enougth to cover you to be full time working on the server (but I'm talking for me, a very small 1-man-shop and I was expecting that anyway). With OSFlash, which is much much much bigger, even if you can experience about the same thing, you will have imho a scaling problem, and here I'm talking about your ressources as a human being :). Even paid and being able to do all this full time 24/24, such a setup for this scale would take quite some time to put in place. For OSS projects, if the web admin is not ready etc. it's ok, people can understand etc. but for paying client, if they do not have an easy admin to manage their project they will want and ask you the human admin to set up things for them, and this is the most time consuming thing imho. I don't know how you want to program all that, but if some of my stuff (jscript and python mostly on windows server) can help, I would be glad to share that or other little tricks that save time in the day ;). cheers, zwetan _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
