On 24 February 2011 17:28, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm also curious about honest *opinions* about how people in the Sage > community would feel about a company making potentially gobs of money > selling support contracts? What balance between profit and giving > back to the community would be appropriate? What services might be > offensive, and what would be OK?
People are going to make money from Sage. There is as you know a book being published on Sage. Both the publisher and the author will make money from it. Yet personally I see that as the best thing that could happen to Sage. As for the issue I raised as support contracts, then the following might be a method which would not irritate anyone, so has almost zero probability of losing any Sage developers. Use the money only to 1) Pay for extra hardware. I don't know if you have UPSs, but that would increase the uptime. 2) Pay for advertising Sage in maths journals, New Scientist, or if deemed appropriate, anywhere where the 4 M's are advertised. 3) Pay for targeted advertisements on Google - Mathematica, MATLAB, Maple might be nice keywords. Do *not* pay any individual Sage developer or a mathematician to work on some aspect of Sage, as that could potentially cause a bit of bad feeling. One could sink an endless amount of money into advertising. Make the "accounts" public. State the number of contracts sold (obviously not to who), and disclose how the money has been spent - X to Google, Y for hard disks, Z for UPS's etc. Personally, I don't feel the amount of money raised would be huge. But the fact commercial support was available, could make Sage more attractive to commercial customers. I believe if the money was not payed to any individual developer, then other developers would not mind providing the support for no cost. (Count me as one). > * I'm curious if something like sagenb.org, but with Google ads, > would be offensive. I could see somebody starting a small business > that is just public notebook servers that also have ads. Personally I have no objection. Even a "Paypal donate" button might be a good idea. > I haven't personally made up my mind about any of this. It's not an easy one. You need to be careful not to let it appear one or two developers are making money from the support contracts, while others contribute and get zero in return. But on the other side of the coin, you should realise that some companies will never use software that has no commercial support. I've also met companies that will not use free software, and critise those that do. They see "free" as "inferior". I once had a discussion with a sales rep from National Instruments. They were willing to give Labview to the university for a very modest cost. I pointed out to the sales rep that even a small amount of money was sometimes difficult to raise as the money was already allocated for something else. When I asked her why they would not simply give it free, her response was that something that if something is given free, it is often perceived as having little value, or of low quality. Sage remains free, but if commercial support contracts were available, it might help get Sage into industry. It strikes me Sage has many features mathematicians want, but less so what industrial users might want, so it might be hard to get much take-up in industry. > -- William Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
