On Wednesday 24 August 2005 19:12, Arno Lehmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Kern Sibbald wrote:
> > 2. Bacula Foundation
> > 3. Bacula Funding Idea
> >
> > http://www.bacula.org/OpenSourceFunding.html Your comments are welcome.
>
> The ongoing discussion is interesting, but I thought of something a
> little different after reading your document.
>
> I'm not thinking about the Bacula Foundation questions, that's another
> decision, but about the funding problem.
>
> You want to charge the users (some of them), relying on fairness.
>
> I think this is not the best approach, especially since many corporate
> users (the companies, not the people!) will have difficulties paying for
> a license:
> Mainly, they get somehing they can also get for free - bacula binaries.
> (More below).
> They do not get something they want to pay for: Guaranteed support from
> Bacula, which means you (or, later, the Foudation).
>
> Concerning binaries: Would you want to provide binaries for all
> platforms people who pay for have? I hink this is not realistic... I
> know about bacula running on AIX, different flavours of Linux and BSDs,
> Sun, HP-UX, Tru64 (?), MacOS, Windows, and probably I forgot the other
> half. If you want people to pay for the binaries, you have to provide the
> ones they need - but you want to avoid becoming a software company.
>
> Now, what do companies who want to use bacula and need support do now?
>
> (Admittedly, I've got no such costumers, but who knows what happens when
> time goes by?)
>
> They pay a consultant, contractor, or however you call it, for a backup
> solution.
>
> So, my suggestion:
> Don't try to charge the end users, charge resellers and consultants.
>
> If you want to keep the GPL, which you want, I want, and other probably
> want, too, you might try the following.
>
> Bacula is a trademark, so nobody may use that name without your permission.
> So, when someone, for example I, want to sell bacula-based services or
> solutions, I probably want to stick the label "Bacula Expert" to my shirt.
>
> You (or the foundation) could sell such labels (and logo use - the bat
> _is_ nice!)
Yes, this could probably work.
>
> For example, to call yourself an "authorized bacula consultant" (ABC,
> sounds good? ;-), you would need to contribute to bacula, and to pay,
> for example, 10% of your net revenue you make with bacula.
> You could leave to figure out the actual amount to the ABC - they should
> know what bacula is worth and probably be more likely to give money.
I don't think this will work because most consultants have a lot of
difficulties making money.
>
> Or you could become an authorized bacula distributor who only pays but
> doesn't contribute.
>
> It would be the foundations duty to determine what is a real
> contribution or what a ABD would cost.
>
> To be listed on the bacula web site as professional support, you'd, of
> course, need to be a contributor :-)
>
> The central idea: Let the ones who are most likely to know the value of
> the work put into bacula decide what to pay.
>
> And now please explain to me why this couldn't work :-)
I think what would work would be to stop supplying binaries of any sort --
including Win32. I think this would make it very clear what is really going
on ... :-)
--
Best regards,
Kern
(">
/\
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