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

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: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.

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)...

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.