Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Pair <stephen at pairhome.net> writes:
> 
> Stephen> Maybe if enough people were willing to pay $10 for a high quality
> Stephen> 3.10, it would be enough to entice a few people into spending a
> Stephen> larger chunk of their time working on that problem.
> 
> I'm pretty sure the cost to administer the collection of $10 and preventing
> anyone who hasn't ponied up from getting the bits will far exceed any total
> revenue.  That's the reality.  If you want money at that level, just put up a
> collection box, and encourage people to donate.

Indeed. I thought in the past about possible models for funding Squeak 
directly and one that made sense was the "Redhat model" by which I mean 
a subscription-based business model where people basically pay for 
support and a continuous integration of fixes and enhancements. Sort of 
like Squeak-central worked internally: Have an update stream or similar 
that paying customers get access to, possibly at different levels of 
support (fixes only; fixes+enhancements; fixes+enhancements+alpha 
stuff). Then make regular external releases that people can download. 
For a commercial entitity there is an obvious advantage to being able to 
continuously integrate incremental changes and having this go through an 
orderly QA and test cycle is another advantage. And of course, for 
larger companies it would mean there is a vendor to talk to. The obvious 
difficulty is there is zero information about the size of the market for 
such a business model; in particular considering that it would need to 
be able to compete with a free community offering.

Cheers,
   - Andreas