On Sun, 2003-03-02 at 21:12, Jon Biddell wrote: > So why offer the discount at all for one distro ???
OK, you asked, this is how it came about: Early last year I was in Dymocks and the only Linux distros they had were old and very expensive, some over $300. This seemed crazy to me. I asked the guys in the shop if they would be interested in stocking a distribution at a much lower cost, e.g. < $20. They said that it sounded good. I thought that an inexpensive distribution in a place like Dymocks would be good, and advertising SLUG and the Linux community in Sydney would be a constructive thing to do. How to get people along to SLUG, though? I suggested to SLUG that having a distro in Dymocks that offered, say, a $5 discount on membership would be a good way to get people along to SLUG. The $5 discount would be built into the price. OK, so now to fund the thing. My company, OpenSkills, agreed to fund the exercise if they could have their name on the sleeve and CD, and if it was run as a non-profit exercise. I chose Debian as the distro to go with. It seemed like a good idea at the time, perhaps because there seemed to be a good body of support for Debian within SLUG. As it happens, I was using RedHat and SuSE at the time, thought recently I have used Debian. Much of the basic art-work for the CD and sleeve came straight from the Debian web site. I had the art-work professionally put together with OpenSkills logo, SLUG logo, and sleeve text. After several reviews involving all parties it was signed off. I had a number of CD-R blanks and sleeves printed up, and then had a few (about 100) "manufactured" (burned, inserted in sleeves and sealed). The final costs were $5 to manufacture each CD, $5 for SLUG and $1 to cover the costs for OpenSkills. The idea was to get them on the shelves for about $15 each. It turns out that Dymocks sell them for about $22, and the Coop for about $15. So far, Dymocks and the Coop carry the CDs, and we are already getting into repeat orders. Only small numbers, though. So there you have it. The SLUG/Debian distribution is just the first CD of the Debian install packaged up with information on how to join SLUG. People who buy this can surrender the the top left corner of the sleeve for a $5 discount off membership. SLUG gets refunded from the non-profit funds managed by OpenSkills. I can assure you that there is no danger at all of a profit for OpenSkills out of this (and yes I did have to explain how non-profit became for-loss)! Both OpenSkills and I hope that the CD proves useful to those who use it, and to SLUG as a way of encouraging people to join. So, as I said before, if you would like to put together a similar distribution, but based on [name your favorite distro here] please do so. If you would like to talk about how to go about doing it, I'd be happy to have a chat with you about it. Send me an email, and we can exchange phone numbers. One thing I have to say, though: The last thing I ever expected to happen as a result of all the effort I put to this project was to be accused of being a Nazi. That really took my breath away. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
