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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 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.
http://MarketingType.com
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.
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.
http://MarketingType.com
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?").
Please help metamoderate.
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 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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