Theo, Please don't take this offensively as it touches a sensitive area.
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. 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! Anyway, wouldn't it be cool to reduce the bandwidth and hard drive usage for mirrors and simplify life for everybody? 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. OpenBSD got to be able to have more income streams. Keep up the good fight! On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Benny Lofgren <bl-li...@lofgren.biz> wrote: > On 2011-04-19 16.27, Theo de Raadt wrote: >> Income: >> The direct income from sales (Computer Shop (primarily) + distributors) >> -> Keeps the electrons flowing >> -> Keeps me from taking that cushy Microsoft job >> >> Donations: >> The OpenBSD Foundation >> -> Funds the big hackathons and some smaller ones >> -> Funds the network links >> The paypal and european accounts >> -> Funds the remaining small hackathons >> -> Buys strange new pieces of hardware which are not donated > > I'm sure this has been brought up before, but is there a way to buy > "licenses" without actually getting the CD:s? > > The reason I ask is that however much I like to have the CD sets in my > bookshelf, I don't need ten or twenty of them... :-) But I still would like > for my company to pay a fair fee for each system we run OpenBSD on. > > What complicates things for us is that the concept of donations isn't very > practical here in Sweden, as a donation isn't regarded as a tax deductible > expense at all, neither for private individuals nor corporations. A pure > donation will in practice be nearly twice as expensive as the price tag > itself would imply. > > For us it would be awesome to have the opportunity to order a "multi-server > CD", where I could specify for example a ten-system "license", which > would get > me one CD set for the price of ten, with a good receipt for a perfectly > valid, > deductible business expense. It would be an excellent deal in my book. :-) > > (In the meantime, I'll just order the usual CD set with a T-shirt or a > mug or > two and hope for a better way to spend more money later on. :-) ) > > > Regards, > /Benny > > -- > internetlabbet.se / work: +46 8 551 124 80 / "Words must > Benny Lvfgren / mobile: +46 70 718 11 90 / be weighed, > / fax: +46 8 551 124 89 / not counted." > / email: benny -at- internetlabbet.se
