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

[John Emmas]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thomas Vecchione" <seablaede at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought
>
> Of course managing expectations out of such a system to understnad that
> one person can only do so much work is something else.
>
Indirectly, this brings up the question of corporate sponsorship.  Paul
mentioned yesterday how SSL had pulled their sponsorship arrangement very
suddenly.  But my gut feeling is that this will always be a risk with a
corporate sponsor for the very reason you stated Seablade - one person can
only do so much work.  Therefore progress (in the eyes of the sponsor) will
sometimes be seen as being too slow.  Ironically, the more sponsors - and
the more demanding they are - the more disappointed they'll be.  Therefore
the natural situation would be for there to only ever be a small number of
corporate sponsors at any one time (probably only one, in fact).

Corporate sponsors might be more encouraged if they felt they were
supporting a 'project' rather than an individual.  In other words, if
corprorate sponsorship was being spread around between a small number of key
developers.  That (in the sponsors' eyes) would negate the fear that a
single developer might get overloaded with work - perhaps work which they
see as being unimportant but which is being driven by one of their
competitors.  I don't know how you'd share the money out fairly.  The
sponsors would probably expect a lot of say in it.  And there's an inherent
risk that it might alientate smaller developers who felt they were getting
left out.  The upside is that it would probably encourage corporate sponsors
to maintain their contributions and not pull out of their sponsorship.deals
unexpectedly.

John




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thomas Vecchione" <seablaede at gmail.com>
To: <ardour-users at lists.ardour.org>
Sent: 14 May 2008 15:40
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] subscription support down, your ideas sought


> 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
>


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> _______________________________________________
> Ardour-Users mailing list
> ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org
>