Jeffrey Altman <jalt...@your-file-system.com> writes: > On 10/2/2012 12:12 AM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
>> Have you thought about what you can offer to SMB (small-medium >> businesses) >> For instance, you charge $3.99 for the iYFS iDevice app. >> What could you offer for $20/month? Would you let a third party resell >> iYFS to the SMB market, as long as you are getting the standard yearly >> incident support rate from the reseller? > There is a rule in place within the New York Tech Meetup community. > Questions about business models are off limits for the mailing lists and > the demo days. Its a good rule because no one is going to provide > answers to business model questions and asking simply creates a awkward > rejection. I think that it would be appropriate to discuss the business model of any sort of foundation or non-profit, where the organization is responsible to the community. That's one of the fundamental differences between private for-profits and public not-for-profits; indeed, it's what makes them private and public. Some degree of speculation about the total amount of money available in the community or about the donations of private organizations to various costs is probably appropriate (even unavoidable). I think the line is somewhere between talking about the total funding required to implement something like rxgk and asking Sine Nomine what their business model is for doing AFS development, and the latter is really a conversation that one would have privately with Sine Nomine (if at all). Part of the problem with discussing business models is that everyone seems to have an opinion, but the business models of private companies are usually driven largely by their contracts with their customers, and those often involve private contracts that neither party is interested in discussing in public. So a lot of the discussion happens without all the necessary information and isn't very useful, and it involves people who really have no say, and it's tricky to work around the confidential information. (As opposed to a public non-profit, where by definition the general public *does* have a say.) -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list OpenAFS-info@openafs.org https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
