[Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought

[Thomas Vecchione]

Re: The ideas about no more public releases, or only providing binaries for
a fee...

I personally think that any open source business model should be not based
around a product so much as a service.  That would mean, instead of
deliviring a product, provide a service for a fee.  In this case, as a
coding project, we might be better placed to offer the ability to put
bounties on specific features or bugs, ala Codeweavers supporting specific
games.  This could be tied into subscriptions where people subscribing can
vote on specific features that are important(Possibly by pledging their
subscription dollars?).  This provides income by providing a coding service.

Of course managing expectations out of such a system to understnad that one
person can only do so much work is something else.  So just because a bounty
is placed up, or pledge is placed, it doesn't mean it will be immediatly
jumped on, depending on the circumstances.

But that is only a single, not all that great idea I think.  I just tend to
prefer not to try to do a product based business in Open Source, because it
can be somewhat self defeating due to the GPL.

Of course those are all business models, and it may be that it is desired
not to be a business model so much and more of a charity model.  In which
case the above need not apply;)

       Seablade
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