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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.
I'm all for supporting open source communities, but I wonder how much of a slice Lulu actually keeps? Maybe a paypal d0nation would be Better...
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I think in part it is that the sale of these can go to people who would not be downloading the product to start with, so it generates more revenue than would otherwise be there.
Also, having an object for sale aids people in donating because it removes the burden of choosing how much to donate from their shoulders. Without such an avenue, many people worry about how much to donate, and whether or not they should send some sorts of messages with a donation, and a million other things. That's also why all projects of even a moderate size should have an FAQ section on giving donations.
Further, in the case of this product, it is essentially just a wing of the original group making a boxed, distributable product, as the project receives the profits, and the project is entirely volunteer anyway.
You're right, as far as you take it. If your main concerns are 1)minimize your costs and 2)maximize your $ contribution to the Open Source community, then you shouldn't buy the Lulu packages. Download, burn, and donate.
But don't forget that what Lulu is selling, really, is convenience. There may well be some folks who would rather send some $ to Lulu (and feel good about supporting open source in the process) than go through the download-and-burn process. And don't discount the convenience of having well-printed documentation! If all you have at home is a little inkjet printer with its expensive cartridges, printing a few hundred pages of docs is neither easy nor cheap.
The open question is whether the market for these packages will percieve Lulu as offering enough value to balance the cost. Looks like they don't, for you. I'll have to look closer to decide for myself. But if the folks at Lulu have things set up right, then pretty much everyone benefits.
I wonder why they didn't package the Mozilla suite? Maybe they're waiting until Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird are all at 1.x or better.
The boxes include documentation and the code on CD with the money going back to support the communities building it.
Many years ago, I worked as an intern for Ready To Run Software, which did something similar; they'd take common packages such as GNU textutils or gcc (which were not part of ANY Unix back then, and Linux was still in its infancy), clean 'em up, make a good installer (again, before the days of autoconf and clever install scripts), provide some decent documentation, and package it all with an executable wrapper onto the tape medium of your choice, for just about -any- Unix in use. Lastly- they supported the product with various contracts and telephone support. Now, they have a porting center with a zillion different Unixes, all set up to play nice, where you can port stuff from Odd Box A to New System B.
I couldn't find it now, but I know back then you could search on a couple of RTR employee email addresses and find stuff in changelogs for most of the core GNU software packages; often times they were one of the very few companies doing actual QA work on these packages (I know, my internship was in QA) and submitting patches and bug reports; they're probably responsible for a lot of the improvements in portability in these packages. RTR also did all the behind the scenes work for the Oreilly powertools CD...
Cool company. I liked working for them- and not just because of the Free Candy table with lots of chocolate (all the machines, and there were almost 50 of them, were named after chocolate. My powermac running linuxppc was 'orange', which took some finagling- "Orange chocolate?").
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I agree, and I also think it helps to have the nice shiny boxed set available with documentation, etc.
Speaking from my own experience trying to introduce Linux to coworkers, the more packaged it looks the better. Just yesterday I offered a coworker a couple of options for buying a bootable Linux CD, and he opted to bypass the $2.95 versions in favour of the more expensive CD with training videos bundle.Oxymoron 2: We use Open Source because we have no money. Therefore how could we pay you to use it?
Oxymoron 3: Even if we could pay you to use it, we could not do do because you've posted anonymously. We therefore do not know who to send it to.
Oxymoron 4: A troll that doesn't write in crayon.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I found that Lulu.com's "ISBN Plus" service was the easiest and cheapest way to get my book listed on Amazon.com and BN.com. For less than $200 you get an ISBN and inclusion on these two major sites. You still need to do all the marketing myself, but there are numerous discussions in Lulu's forums about "guerilla marketing" your work. Getting it reviewed on Amazon and BN, creating Amazon lists of best-selling items that are similar to yours and including yours on that list, creating a "So you want to..." page and including your item on the page along with similar items, uploading a complete description/cover/excerpt for your product, etc. Seems that some of these would apply to marketing your software as well.
I'm curious about how effective getting listed on Amazon and BN is for software. Do many customers bother searching these sites when they're shopping for software? Or do they use dedicated tech sites, or just go right to Google for the software? I'd like to see some comments posted in a few months by some of the software sellers who've tried this.
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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?
I see quite a bit of value in Lulu's products. When I want to encourage support for FOSS among people who are unfamiliar with it, these package deals could be just the ticket. This is something I could send as a gift to a relative, or pass around in a meeting while I was presenting the advantages of a windows to linux migration.
I will probably buy the OpenOffice set in the next month or so and if it is as well done as it looks on the web site, I expect to make heavy use of it next year (without ever spinning its CD).
Lazy people are not an issue, it is the people who do not have time we should be concerned with... Lazy people will not be a market to worry about, as changing wil require effort that they are too lazy to do untli a critical mass is reached in the market and they no longer feel lazy about a change. Time conscious professionals who demand productivity at a bottom cost are the market to target. They are the ones to make changes and take a chance on something different, especially if it can add to their bottom line.
There are a lot of very competent computer users that have no idea that free/OSS software that is often superior to it's proprietary cousins is available.
Quite true! We need to market harder as a community (word of mouth, try this installs, letting people know what we did our work on, writing documentation, writing books, getting publicity in circulars,
In my experiences, lazy people are not the market for linux. There is another group of people far more important and much more likely to pay for something they could get for free. Those who simply do not have time for new things. Especially new things outside of their career field. Can you imagine taking up medicine, auto mechanics, construction and teaching on top of your current work? I do not mean as a hobby, but well enough to understand it and do it right. Very few people can handle half of a load like that, let alone the whole thing. Yet, we all want good medical treatment, a vehicle that runs well, a solid structure to live in (preferably our own) and for those with children, the best education they can have. There is a reason most of us pay for the services. We do not have time ourselves to do them.
The biggest reason linux is not mainstream is ease of use, ease of install and ease of work. Yeah, I know linux is not as hard to install as windows. The key there is they do not have to install windows, linux they do. Linux is not as easy to use as windows yet. Some aspects of it are. Most aspects (from general joe user perspective) are not. As far as getting work done, linux is not 100% with MS yet either. I can do most of what I need in linux, and do. Some I still need MS for. True, that is because of the way MS has created their applications and the lock in they build in, but that does not change the reality.
I have several clients that have moved (with my help) form linux to windows. None of them have regretted it. Not all of my clients can move to linux, some are stuck in MS land for now. Those that have moved have used the money saved to actually hire more people, or buy new production equipment. But, still, not all of my clients are ready for that.
In all that you do in the world or MS and consumerism, follow the money trail. THere are fringe markets that do things for other reasons, but the bulk of the market does things with dollars and sense in mind.
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