Rafiu Fakunle wrote: > Hi list, > > With the pending release of Openfiler 2.0 Final, the Openfiler Project > will need to become self-funding. This basically means going commercial > as a standalone product. > > Being Open Source, we believe the best way to achieve this is to charge > an annual subscription fee, much like a lot of other commercial Open > Source projects do. > > The key question we need to address is what should the subscription fee be? > > As we work on how to arrive at a reasonable figure to charge, we thought > it would be a good idea to get a feel for what you, the Openfiler > community, would like to pay. > > So we put it to you - what is Openfiler worth to you, and how much would > you like to pay for the continued development and support of the software?
Let me give you the perspective of someone whom has discussed similar issues in other markets with customers. The primary motivating factor behind business adoption of Open Source technologies and products is (from what we have seen and heard from our customers) the cost. Free to them means free as in "free beer". Acquisition cost, and subsequent support costs are primary considerations in most cases. Several (few) customers indicated that free as in freedom (e.g. the mission of FOSS systems) was a consideration, though when pressed a fair number of them indicated that they liked that it opened up the marketplace for them, without vendor lockin. Customers and end users I have spoken to detest vendor lock in, and these days will actively seek to avoid it if possible. So you get a balance between cost and freedom, and from what I have seen, cost usually wins. Moreover, when we made specific changes (GPL released) which added significant performance value to various codes, and then asked people to pay (marginal rates) for them, their generalized immediate response was "why, as they are free, so I can just pull down your changes, build it myself, and get the value you are asking us to pay for". This strongly dis-incentivizes us to continue this work. I am not trying to start a flame-fest, or a license war, or anything like this. GPL effectively removes the ability for you to ask people to pay for the value you provide. You can offer the GPL item as part of a larger service/support offering, which is hard for others (including users) to replicate. Get enough end users of OF, and there will be a few whom are willing to pay for support as it is mission critical for them. This is unfortunately not possible for low user-volume project. MySQL has 10's of millions of installations, and as far as I know (not well), on the order of thousands of paying customers. Their model works well for a widely used critical functionality product. Similarly for SugarCRM. For a code with only a few thousand users, this could be a problem. Just my thoughts after dealing with this in another market. Joe > > > KR > > > Rafiu Fakunle > Openfiler Project > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Openfiler-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
