On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 02:03:41AM -0700, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> We, for example, need to ask ourselves if there even should be an
> "official" CD distribution of FreeBSD and, if so, what the selection
> criteria for such officiality should be.
I was thinking about this the other day. I don't think there's very
much money likely to be made in "value-add" CD distributions in the
near future -- that requires hard work to add value, and that requires
someone being paid to do it.
What's likely to happen if we let it is that a number of entities will
publish verbatim copies of the "officially produced" ISO images, and
do so at production cost + some profit margin which only feeds back
into their own pockets. This means that if the larger CD distribution
facilities like, say, CheapBytes could do this more cheaply than
someone like, say, DaemonNews, the latter will find it very hard to
compete without losing money unless they can feed off of some kind of
"preferred vendor" status. Entities which are more friendly to the
FreeBSD project (like DaemonNews) and who may want to donate a portion
of the proceeds to the Foundation will have to take it out of their
profit margins and will lose money relative to those that don't.
In the past, the officially blessed CD distributor was kicking back
money directly to FreeBSD; whatever happens in the future with respect
to CD distribution, I think we should make sure this continues to
happen in an economically sustainable way.
I also don't think people should be thinking about terminating (or
even greatly weakening) the CD distribution relationship with WRS;
they're still a big potential funding resource, even if their current
FreeBSD sales channel sucks. As I've said in other messages, they're
probably still in the stage where they're trying to integrate FreeBSD
into their product line, and need customer feedback about how to
improve their performance.
Kris
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