Supporting Community Projects

Lulu has announced a new program of creating boxed sets around particular technologies. They've got Fedora Core 3, OpenOffice, Bugzilla, as well our little Slashcode . The boxes include documentation and the code on CD with the money going back to support the communities building it. Lulu also does a whole bunch of cool stuff around self-publishing for on-demand items.

Comments

More money to the developers?

[RandoX]

I guess I'm not sure what the point is of this. If you want to support these projects, why not just donate it directly to them? Surely Lulu has to take the cost of physical production out of your money before giving proceeds to the project. Wouldn't it be cheaper to download it, burn your own, and give your $10 - $25 straight to the development effort? I know a pretty box and manual are nice, but does it really come with anything you don't get digitally?

Re:More money to the developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's a bit of a ripoff actually. There was a windows and mac OS cd for sale once that someone packaged to make gimp install on their machines, and in the end it was only an automatic installer for something you can download anyway. And people want you to pay for this?.

I dont know, it doesnt sound in the spirit of the GPL thats all

Awfully vague descrptions

[Anonymous Coward]

So pretend that you don't know what Fedora Core is, and try to figure it out from this description:

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.

Colin Charles is a Fedora developer and has previously written countless how-tos, FAQs, tutorials and curricula. He co-authored a Linux desktop guide available via the United Nations Development Program's International Open Source Network.

In Fedora Core 3: Made Simple, Colin brings his experience together in an easy-to-use guide that stresses learning by doing. Buy the book or the software separately, or get both in a boxed set. Heck, it's up to you. No matter what you buy or why you buy it, most of the profit goes to Colin and the development community.

Re:Support

[salutor]

A PayPal donation would obviously be better in the sense that it would provide more money to the community in a more direct way, but some people who might not otherwise donate will be motivated by the idea of getting a physical something in exchange for their money. It's sort of like Public Radio offering you a coffee mug or a sweatshirt for your donation.

Keep in mind that Lulu was founded by Bob Young (Red Hat), so this is not that much of a stretch.

Updates

[tomalpha]

I'd like to know how they deal with updates - new versions, patches. The big OSS projects all have their fair share of vulnerabilities and need constant patching.

For the less technically oriented end-user, to whom I assume these boxes are pitched, some form of automatic download + patch would be a must.

Can't find anything on lulu.com that talks about this - without it, the product is going to be dangerous (unpatched vulns galore)...

It is called 'consumer confidence'

[tod_miller]

Also, for some reason, some high end training material and applications used to be sold in CD format, with all the information.

By simply printing a copy, binding it, and attaching the CD (about 0.0000000...001% of the costs) the customer thought it was worth an extra grand or so...

good business!

Sometimes Money != Support

[WebCowboy]

Money certainly is important in supporting open projects, but there are other things that need to be done as well. I'd say there are three main categories:

* monetary support--help feed the coders

* technical support--dontate time and skills to find and fix bugs, or add functionality

* moral support--advocacy/evangelism, marketing, publicity.

The first two everyone has been aware of for some time. People have donated $ to software causes and sent in patches since before the dawn of GNU. The last point is one that has been neglected until recently (Mozilla has woken up and realised the importance of such support for example). Lulu has done something brilliant in addressing the third form of support, while still helping the cause financially.

In order for FOSS alternatives to become mainstream they have to be marketed in a more mainstream fashion. Mainstream computer users mostly run systems with closed software, and are used to going to Best Buy, picking up a box with a printed manual and a plastic disc and paying for it. If they buy online or mail order they expect something shipped.

The averager person is not as comfortable as the typical FOSS geek with supporting a system that has no tangible goods associated with it. Illogical as it seems to us geeks, simply having the software available on a CD, in a box with a printed manual all professionally done, lends the product credibility.

Look at Windows. It has been playing catch-up to Linux stability- and security-wise for years now. The pack-in documentation of the retail box distribution is pretty much useless and is never read. Furthermore, most people get nothing but a lisence certificate and recovery CD with pre-installed OEM editions. Regardless, tech support is nearly useless and real documentation is buried in online files.

Sometimes, it seems that the mere fact that Microsoft professionally packages the product and fills store shelves world-wide make MS Windows or MS Office appear to Joe Schmoe to be more credible than Linux Distro X or OpenOffice. Yeah yeah, MS is a monopoly and could put feces in the box and make money, but they weren't always a monopoly. They got there not with the best technology but with shrewd business decisions and effective marketing at a time when competitors had neither.