Gary and Stuart,
We could certainly explore the donation route. I'm doing a little bit of
research to try to determine what the realistic costs would be to setup a
dedicated server to run a multiplayer system. That will give us a better
idea what we need to shoot for.
Don't feel like you have to talk personal donation amounts in public, but
since we are on the subject, what's fair or realistic to ask someone to
donate per month or per year for something like this?
If we go the donation route, will someone have to be constantly pestering
everyone to get their donations in this month? Will this be an ongoing
hassle trying to chase people down or drum up new donations to keep the
service running? Can we expect that people would commit to donating some
fixed dollar amount per month in perpetuity? I'm not sure I'd feel
comfortable making such a promise myself. One time donations are a lot
easier to get, but then we'd have to have someone always hunting for more
donations.
What happens if we come up short in a month or a year? Do we cancel the
service? Do more begging? What if we collect more than we need?
FlightGear isn't an official non-profit which makes it harder to ask for
donations. Setting up a non-profit organization would be a real good idea,
but that takes someone who (a) knows how to do it and (b) can commit to
spending the non-trivial amount of time required to manage the non-profit,
file the paperwork, file tax returns, whatever else needs to get done.
There would be some non-trivial amount of overhead in managing a non-profit
which means a substantial portion of donated money would go to overhead, not
the intended purpose. I'm just trying to think though the various scenarios
realistically.
There are a lot of sticky questions or the potential to seriously burn up
the time of key volunteers (or their money if we come up short on donations
and want to try to maintain the services.)
We could continue in our current mode where we try to get people to
volunteer their own servers or their own bandwidth (or servers/bandwidth
they have control over). This can work, but as our popularity and loads
increase, this can be a bigger and bigger burden. Volunteer services like
this work best if they can fly under the radar screen and not cause a
problem or show up as the primary resource hog when you print out usage
stats reports.
So this is why I floated what I think is at least an interesting idea.
Seeing if we could generate a consistent revenue trickle through software
ads/recommendations in our installer (i.e. www.opencandy.com) Presumably if
the stream provided enough funds to buy some server bandwidth, it would be
relatively consistent and pretty easy for a single person to manage the
whole process .... much easier than the other options. I'm just making wild
guesses at costs and possible revenue right now, but if it worked out it
would be pretty slick, and would presumably scale with the popularity of
FlightGear.
It's all open for discussion, and I don't want to link open-candy only with
paying for a multiplayer server, that's just the route my thought process
went through.
For what it's worth, another model would be to setup a commercial
multiplayer server and charge people to access it, but that would require a
lot of infrastructure development and is probably my least favorite of all
the options.
It would be nice if people could fly as much as they want online for "free",
except nothing is ever completely free so the question is who is willing to
pay and in what form is the payment made (donations of money or servers,
charge per use, having to click through a page of suggested software
packages when you install the software, etc.)
Thinking out loud here ....
Curt.
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Gary Neely wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
>
> > I'd be prepared to contribute some money for a dedicated MP/code/download
> > server, even if it was in the US and I wouldn't benefit personally.
> >
> > I'm sure with a bit of publicity using the newsletter we could get
> together
> > sufficient contributions. We could even offer immortality in the THANKS
> > file for the project, if we were feeling particularly generous.
>
>
> Just to back Stuart up, I had similar thoughts about contributions and
> use of the newsletter. I would be pleased to donate funds regularly to
> help maintain suitable MP servers. I can't speak for others, but I'm
> willing to bet there are many like-minded members of the community out
> there.
>
> -Gary aka Buckaroo
>
>
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--
Curtis Olson:
http://www.atiak.com - http://aem.umn.edu/~uav/
http://www.flightgear.org -
http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/curt/<http://www.flightgear.org/blogs/category/personal/curt/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3.
Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great
experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today.
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