Please don't take this offensively as it touches a sensitive area.
Right. We should not be offended when you say "You are not getting
any sales because you don't do enough". "Do more."
Benny's proposal is good! License the CD's as 10, 50, 100 user license
set, exactly like you do for the old CDs which are $500+. This way
OpenBSD taps into the commercial market. Commercial users buy the
commercial CDs.
Don't be ridiculous. Commercial users don't do that because OpenBSD
is already free. They are not fools. Perhaps there are a few who are
asking for specific methods where they can help fund us, within their
constraints, but that is not nearly the same as "get rich quick".
They are an outstanding few, and they are not real commercial users.
Even with proper deductable donation structures in place (ie.
the OpenBSD Foundation) large corporations that are using OpenSSH
in their products have given less than pennies per product. The
world is not a shiny "throw money around" place as you think.
Last time around somebody asked for packages on DVD. OpenBSD gets
pre-orders a month in advance and if so many people want
i386/amd64/etc package DVDs, just give it to them! MacOS + Linux +
OpenSolaris has done some work on fat binaries, and I am sure with the
expertise around here it can be done within some reasonable time. What
a kick-ass project that would be!
I understand that this is another form of saying "do not do enough".
We should do more. We should make a DVD, spend money on manufacturing
it and packaging it, have people like Bob who is working on the
'buffer flipping' code instead go add more entries to the web page,
and then see it if works. See if more than 50 sell. And what if it
is a loss. And hey, every 6 months we can do *more work* to build yet
another product!
Anyway, wouldn't it be cool to
reduce the bandwidth and hard drive usage for mirrors and simplify
life for everybody?
It might be news to you that the mirrors do that for free.
A survey is free from so many websites. We get spammed all the time,
participate in this and that, why not host a survey right now
someplace on openbsd.org or one of the devs websites and see how much
interest is really there.
Yes, we should build a survey. And a wiki. It would be awesome.
We'd get rich.
OpenBSD got to be able to have more income streams.
Income? I see that you have made a list of things of "more things we
should do". I don't see gauranteed income in there, anywhere.
I can't even get the guys who hack on the project coordinated to work
on the 49.html page so that we can get a ANNOUNCEMENT file ready for
the upcoming file, because it isn't code, and it isn't as much fun.
So you come here telling us we should do more? Get real.
I don't do business, but I have more business sense than you.
