QSL Cards as a Way of Tracking Open-Source Software?

jerryasher asks: "I get a kick out of examining my logs to see who downloads my software, and from how far away. I was downloading md5summer one night, and came across this suggestion from its author, Luke Pascoe: 'So if you like MD5summer, send me a postcard.' Well this is a brilliant suggestion, and one that nicely borrows from our Ham radio heritage. This is what Ham operators do when they make contact with each other: each Ham operator designs a QSL card that describes himself and usually his location. On making contact with someone on the air, they exchange these postcards. So let's start sending QSL cards to each other!" Interesting thought. Might some of you be interested in doing this?

"It's always encouraging to receive a thank you for your work, and that's what a QSL card would be, a personalized thank you and memento from each downloader. It would be good for the community too: if we are working for our egos, then QSL cards would be an inexpensive way to boost a developer's ego. (Considering how few of you are clicking on that PayPal button, perhaps you might be motivated to buy a stack of QSL cards and to send them out)

It would be good for the economy: buying, printing, sending QSL cards will help developers, printers, and the post office. And it can be good for our projects: we might find that in addition to tee shirts and coffee mugs, our development projects can sell a variety of promotional QSL cards to developers to send to others.

So how do we turn this into the meme for 2002?"

Comments

Interesting idea.

[gantzm]

Maybe EFF should start printing cards and selling them.

Majorcool / Majordomo

[ChiefArcher]

It's either majordomo or majorcool that says "would you like to send an email to the author stating you've successfully installed this software"... more or less... That's one way that this could work..

ChiefArcher

the snmp guys know about qsl cards

[TheGratefulNet]

the net-snmp website has been doing 'the postcard thing' for many years now.

Digital QSL...

[gnovos]

The more I think about it, the more I like it. All we need, though, is to put these on those business-card CDs. It would be very cool to not just send a picture of where you are from, but a few minutes of video, maybe a snapshot or two of the local festivals and activities, and a personal note of some kind.

Heck if it gets popular enough, maybe it'll take off beyond simple "hello" recognition and we'll see these start showing up in sea-faring bottles, wedged in between the seats of long-distance busses, stuck into the crack in old brick walls down dark alleys. It would be fascinating to collect these.

Re:Digital QSL...

[biglig2]

Heh, how about, every time you download some Windows postcardware you send them a burn of your favorite Linux Distro. Might encourage them!

Step 1

[Otter]

Here's a start: set your email address in your FTP client/browser. (Anonymous FTP uses it as the password.) I also look at my logs and half the downloads I get are from default passwords.

The disturbing thing is that close to a third of the downloads for my KDE applications are from the default IE user. I wonder what all those people do when they get a source tarball instead of whatever it is they're expecting.

postcardware..

[Suppafly]

postcardware has been around as long as software has been around..

Re:postcardware..

[Jon Peterson]

That's true.

Long ago (bout '93 I guess) I was really into POVRAY (www.povray.org). I read the usenet group every day, spent loads of time rendering, helped set up websites, yadda yadda yadda. Then one day, Dan Farmer, one of the principle developers, thought it would be cool if he could show his wife that all those hours he spent on the computer was really doing something. He figured he'd ask all the folks who enjoyed using POVRAY for free to mail him a postcard. That way when the postman turned up with a big sack of mail, his wife would understand what this 'Internet' thing was all about.

Now, at this time POVRAY was pretty much the only 3D graphics app available for free to most people. It had a huge user base, it was a regular give-away on the coverdisks of PC mags. By anyone's reckoning it's still a major bit of free software.

Now, guess how many postcards he got...

I do believe the final total was around 10.

People who would spend hours staring at their screens while their 486z rendered stuff, or who would spend hours posting to usenet, could not be arsed to go and buy a postcard and a stamp and scribble an address on it.

That's just the way online stuff seems to be. Kind of sad, but true.

I bet if Slashdot posted an article saying "Let's show how much we like Linux - everyone go send Linus a card at this address" the total response would barely be much higher.

Re:postcardware..

[_Laban_]

People are just to darn lazy to give a damn. It's just to easy to not send a card, no one will see that you didn't do it. I say we should force everyone who has used postcardware without "paying" the license to wear a yellow cone on their head.

But I guess most of us would be wearing 'em then.

Yeah, I've done something sort of similar

[StandardDeviant]

I had my ass sort of pulled out of the fire at one point by a utility I found via freshmeat. (It was something to securely allow users to change some of their account info via a browser, this helped at a startup where most of the dev team was win32 but our servers were unix). The developer was in Denmark, IIRC, and I sent him an email thanking him for the cool work he did, and telling him where I was. I included a link to the mapquest page for where the startup was located. He wrote me back saying that it was the coolest email he'd received in a while becuase he'd never expected that somebody half the world away would be enjoying his work.