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?

[salutor]

I think part of the point of this stunt is the manuals, which are at least potentially better than anything you could get elsewhere. The books are written by Colin Charles http://www.bytebot.net/blog/index.php, who is an interesting guy. Lulu's strength is obviously in providing a distribution platform for unconventional books; in essence this is just a way to package software with the books.

Re:More money to the developers?

[Jameth]

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.

Re:More money to the developers?

[Elvon Livengood]

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?

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.

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.

Ready To Run Software

[SuperBanana]

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?").

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)...

I checked out some of their cool stuff ....

[scupper]

and found this book I might actually buy:

Living in Vertical Time
by Brian Narelle
Description: The Teachings of Murray the Buru. These ruminations on life, love and peace were inspired by a donkey named Murray, a special soul housed in a 600 pound body. My friend, my teacher...my '"buru". (104 pages)

Lulu easiest/cheapest way to get listed on Amazon

[software_trainer]

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.

Here's the point (well, a point)

[mysticgoat]

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).