Hi David,
Thanks for your comments.
Asking people how much they are ready to pay for OpenFiler (you can
replace this by any other opensource initiative/project) is _very_
difficult, as you'll always have some stating "hey, this is
opensource, it should be free"...
I know, many people may instinctively do this. However a lot of folks,
such as yourself, have a full appreciation of the level of commitment it
takes to maintain a project like Openfiler.
Anyway, even if I'm ready to pay for OpenFiler, I have no clue how
much I'm ready to pay per year (or single shot or other).
Yeah it's a strange question to ask. Most of the time a vendor would
just put his wares out there and stick a price tag on it :). I guess
this is taking community participation to a whole new level.
Would it be possible for you (either technically possible but also, if
you feel like it) to propose different levels of subscription (with
"license keys") ?
I would sugggest :
. free for people who want to use OpenFiler as just a filer usable by
http or ftp (or local users)
. a subscription for people who want to join an existing domain/AD or
use OpenFiler as their PDC (2.1 or 2.2 if I understood correctly ?)
. a subscription for people willing to do iSCSI
This model was considered, but we cannot pursue it currently because:
1) It's not currently technically feasible due to how Openfiler is designed
2) It just restricts users' functionality and that's not something we
wish to do
This would allow people who want to "discover" OpenFiler to discover
it and people using it in "business" usage to pay for it.
Openfiler itself will continue to be freely available and distributable.
What we're doing is building a service infrastructure around it, which
would be chargeable on a subscription basis.
So for a home user that just wants a guest account and can figure
his/her way around the UI with little or no help, they can just go ahead
and use it. If you're a business and want to deploy Openfiler to manage
your data then access to support resources would obviously be quite
important. So stuff like:
1) Automated updates
2) Documentation
3) Training
4) Developer forum access
etc
I guess 99USD per year sounds nice (even 199 USD per year).
199 USD sounds a whole lot nicer than 99 USD :).
So far we've had the following suggestions:
1) $0 (implied)
2) $50
3) $99
4) $199
Thanks again for taking the time to make your position known. Much
appreciated.
KR
Rafiu Fakunle
Openfiler Project
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