I believe the idea of exclusive content (whatever that may be) is not
a solution to funding. In fact I think it will even have the opposite
effect of alienating many of the *178* who bothered enough to vote.
Much better to foster a more *inclusive* community spirit and try to
increase that number a 100 times. Then you may have the critical mass
to offer value-added extras. Blender is a good example and despite
past failures it now seems to be doing pretty well. Outside of the
product itself, I put most of Blenders success down to the very
vibrant BlenderArtists FORUM with "over 20,000 registered users". IMHO
a modern style forum is essential these days as I suspect most of the
younger generation are simply not inspired by mailing lists. There is
a sense of "congregating" around a forum while a mailing-list appears
as a somewhat intrusive cluttering of already busy mailboxes. It would
also help if there was a more visible focus on new users and usability
in general.

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 4:10 AM, Stephen Pair <stephen at pairhome.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>
>