On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:17 PM, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

> 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.


I don't consider the RedHat model to be direct funding.  It's indirect in
the sense that they aren't charging for the actual software, but rather the
service of consolidating, testing and managing the contributions of many.
 That is valuable, and obviously, that can work.  My argument is that maybe
copyright law actually has it right, but that it's just the timeframe in
which things become open source (life+70) that's off the mark.  So, let's
imagine that one creates some cool new thing that's interesting to most of
the community.  If they make it available under a license that says "pay $10
(I'm making up a number here) and you can use this as you desire now, or
wait 1 year and it will be available to you under MIT" what would be the
reaction?  I'd say that competes very well with free.  Why would anyone go
to the effort of creating something competitive if the code is good, if the
fee is nominal and if the duration of the commercial license is a)
established up front and irrevocable, and b) not onerously far into the
future.  Unless someone thinks they could come up with something better in
the very near future, there is very little incentive to do so.  And if they
do, well that benefits everyone.  The people that need it most would fund
the development for everyone else.

In terms of figuring out the market, there were ~500 people that cared
enough about squeak to vote on the board.  If you take that as a guide, then
maybe you guess that with a reasonably appealing offering you could capture
50% of that market at $10.  That's $2500.  It's not going to set anyone free
of their corporate shackles, but it's not bad if the effort amounts to a few
weekends of work and you enjoy what you're doing along the way.  And, the
more such things we have, the more appealing squeak becomes and the more the
market grows.

I am merely frustrated that in my ~5 year absence from squeak, my perception
is that squeak is worse off today than it was 5 years ago.  I am encouraged
in some respects, but in others, it's very discouraging (very, very
discouraging).  I am also very concerned that the entire open source
movement seems to be moving in a direction where we'll all be employed by
large corporations who grant us the right to contribute to open source "at
their convenience."  That is disturbing.

So anyway, we can debate it, or we can try it.  There are a lot of things
people have contributed over the years that I would have gladly paid for as
long as I knew it would be MIT licensed in the near future and was good
quality.  Monticello, OmniBrowser, Traits, UI enhancements, and more
recently hydraVM (just to name a very few...there are many others).  I would
like to see someone try this with their next contribution.

- Stephen
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