Hi,
I agree with Arno.
There's also something wich hurts me : a small company with ~ 2 servers
and 10 workstation would pay 100 $, and a General Electric, for example,
would pay only 500 $ ! Well, 100 $ is given compared to commercial
software, but it is not equitable in my opinion.
With the system proposed by Arno, the contribution of the companies
would be proportioned to their size by their use of
contractors/consultants which would be the "real contributors".
Also, the status of contributor could give some voting rights to decide
what are the priority items on the todolist...
Ludovic Strappazon
Arno Lehmann a écrit :
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!)
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.
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 :-)
Arno
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