Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 18:25:57 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: nate@sneezy.sri.com (Nate Williams) Cc: Karl Denninger <karl@Mcs.Net>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Support charges ( was Re: SUP target for -STABLE...) Message-ID: <21406.806376357@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:53:49 MDT." <199507212253.QAA21981@rocky.sri.MT.net>
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> [ Paying for support ] > > > > If I'm going to pay for "support", defined as I report problems and some > > organization works on fixing them, where the person(s) time that is used is > > amortized over a lot of people, then that organization "owns" the fixes and > > I get them under what is essentially a license. Eh? What? I must have missed something from Karl here since the quoted text appears in none of the discussions I've seen fly through my mailbox. To answer the above, I think it's a little bit more subtle than that. Karl has worked with the likes of BSDI, where ownership is pretty straight-forward, and thus has certain expectations about how this works. BSDI don't put their software up for anon ftp and they don't give away their work, meaning that the concept of "fix ownership" is more apropos there. That's not really the case here, though you could still use that model with one important twist: FreeBSD, Inc. would "own" the fixes for about 4 nanoseconds and then transfer the redistribution rights straight to the public. Problem solved. I've already replied to Karl's questions of cost and clarified that he would NOT be paying for a full-time engineer. He'd be paying a much more modest fee for the privilege of being able to call a telephone number or send an email for a quick and reliable response. Needless to say, I would not collect so much as *one penny* for support before such time as I had enough people signed up that I knew I could pay the salaries of as many people as I thought would be necessary to run such an org effectively. The last thing I want or need is to collect money and then have a lot of unhappy customers saying that the tech support line is constantly busy or they got fobbed off with an excuse and no fix. There's also the question of what to do when we get a problem report for an area of the system that's clearly in the domain of someone NOT working for the organization. We can't pass the buck to a volunteer, so we need to make sure that we have total coverage of the system replicated in the support organization. This would effectively mean creating a "shadow FreeBSD Project" of sorts, which would take some finesse since it means that the corporation is going to have its own CVS tree and its own lineage of FreeBSD releases or face an even less desirable situation where volunteers are co-opted into working for the org or get their toes stepped on when someone in the corporation rushes in to fix a bug that they're contractually obligated to fix quickly and don't have much choice about. > > If I am going to pay for a person's livelihood in total or substantially in > > total (ie: thousands of dollars a month) then I own their output. > > Period. > > Are you hiring them as a programmer, or as a support person. There is a > subtle difference in my mind. When Cygnus was paid to develop gcc for To clarify this again: If Karl was paying thousands of dollars a month he could HAVE the fixes and probably the support engineer's first-born child as well. That's not the kind of money we're talking about though and I furthermore don't think that this kind of model would work anyway for reasons I stated earlier - neither Karl nor we need the kinds of strings attached that this level of contribution would imply, certainly at least not for a support contract. Jordan
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