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Re: donations
by Xanadu on Monday 18/Oct/2004, @13:56
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While this is a good idea, and one I've seen kicked around for quite a few years now, the argument always comes up: that's not very professional. It was once thought to have a "donations" link prominently (or even not) right on the KDE home page (and/or as you suggest somewhere in KDE itself like Help --> About --> Donate), but PHB's tend to think a lot less of software, "companies", web sites, etc. that appear to be "begging" for money.
I agree that making it more obvious that KDE programmers need to eat too, but, I also agree with the impression side of it. If there was a happy middle ground...
I know and understand the value of OSS (and KDE!! :-) ), but to convince my current (and past) PHB's of that value is hard enough as it is, and to throw "Donate to [insert OSS project]" right on a home page or something isn't that great of an idea, in this respect.
M. |
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Re: donations
by Eric Laffoon on Monday 18/Oct/2004, @14:41
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Your "non professional" argument is only valid if you are talking about projects with no marketing and business savvy... good for humor maybe but not for rational consideration. See my post above...
When it becomes more trendy to use FLOSS then it is already more businesses will be going to sites of projects. Asking for a donation from a company on a web site is a difficult presentation to make. Having your company presented as a sponsor of a project on a web site other companies go to, while at the same time getting a tax write off for helping to improve critical business software is so no brainer it's not even funny.
In this case it's not what you say so much as how you say it.
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Re: donations
by Xanadu on Monday 18/Oct/2004, @22:17
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Mr. Laffoon,
> Your "non professional" argument is only valid if you are talking about
> projects with no marketing and business savvy...
> good for humor maybe but not for rational consideration
But doesn't KDE have "marketing value"? I believe it does. My PERSONAL OPINION is that it is the "superior Desktop for *NIX", this is why I use it. We, KDE users, prefer this "desktop" over others. *Please* correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption. And it is us, that are in "control" of corporate networks, that (help) decide what gets used. (yes, I'm stretching a bit, but you see my point)
Aside, I choose "Linux" / KDE / Gentoo for my personal (main) machine. Cool. OK, whatever. How do I convince PHB's to *POTENTIALLY* drop a few millions on some "OS" (please understand I know the difference between an OS and desktop...) when they see web sites that are asking for cash? It gets rather interseting at that point.
That was my only point (althogh I made a few in there, but... :-) )
> When it becomes more trendy to use FLOSS then it is already more businesses
> will be going to sites of projects. Asking for a donation from a company on >a web site is a difficult presentation to
> make.
Yep. You, sir, are 100% right. When it becomes more obvious that OSS (in general) is the way to go, yup, asking to feed the codist's (programmer's) kids isn't a big deal at all (and rather welcome, IMHO) ).
As far as the rest:
> Having your company presented as a sponsor of a project on a web site
> other companies go to, while at the same time getting a tax write
> off for helping to improve critical business software is so no brainer
> it's not even funny.
I agree, 100%. One just has to get to that point first, which is my point...
M.
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Re: donations
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 21/Oct/2004, @02:13
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> Mr. Laffoon,
What's next, "sir"? I have a ponytail to my belt. ;-)
> But doesn't KDE have "marketing value"? I believe it does. My PERSONAL OPINION is that it is the "superior Desktop for *NIX", this is why I use it. We, KDE users, prefer this "desktop" over others.
I don't know where you're getting this. I said projects that didn't have marketing savvy, as in developers not knowing how to promote their projects. This is no reflection on the project. I've been using KDE since I discovered it in 2000 and I develop on it as my desktop of choice. I have only run windows a few times in the last 10+ years and I never liked it. BTW I'm running Gentoo also.
> I agree, 100%. One just has to get to that point first, which is my point...
Maybe it's just that I don't see any as points but all as a stream, and it's not really an external thing that has to happen for me, but having the resources. If I was independently wealthy I would be promoting at maximum level now. ;-)
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Re: donations
by Bojan on Tuesday 19/Oct/2004, @06:43
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How about creating a KDE club (something Mandrake has done with its Mandrakeclub), where one could join for a small annual fee? I use Mandrake and I was very happy when I found out about the possibility to join Mandrakeclub for something like 60$ which can be paid with a credit card - for me that is very small amount of money, considering the quality of software I get with Mandrake Linux. I guess that this could be done with KDE too. Many users that are happy with KDE and can afford it, would join the KDE club for a small annual fee, IMHO.
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Re: donations
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 21/Oct/2004, @02:30
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There's nothing inherently wrong with it but I don't think it's optimal either. There are questions about the value offered to both users and developers. What would the club provide? How would the developers delegate the funds? As a former Mandrake users I think you could say I am one who supports their efforts and this club was an idea to address financial shortcomes for a company. In the pursuit of this they released development packages under the label of "community". One of these contained a CVS snapshot of Quanta where we transitioned the parser and it was a disaster. We had advised CVS testers on our list not to get it. As a result of this decision we saw a pile of reports to our user list and requests for help. In debugging them we finally found that the problem was a non released version and advised everyone to get a new copy. So this effort created additional work for us and tarnished our image with who knows how many users... because they needed to offer something for their side of the contract.
BTW I haven't seen any funding from this, but still happily provide the software. The big problem here was the corporate decision to use the "community" edition. It's a feel good term that is warm and fuzzy, but it should have been called development snapshot, which it was. In fact real community software would imply that the distribution was actually in contact with the community. Unfortunately as a developer I've seen distributions interact with us on releases once from Mandrake from a guy they had to let go in cutbacks and from Debian and Gentoo... community projects.
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