Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 18:57:27 -0700 From: "Amancio Hasty Jr." <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: nate@sneezy.sri.com (Nate Williams), Karl Denninger <karl@Mcs.Net>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Support charges ( was Re: SUP target for -STABLE...) Message-ID: <199507220157.SAA06140@rah.star-gate.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 21 Jul 1995 18:25:57 PDT." <21406.806376357@time.cdrom.com>
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I think that Karl should shell out thousands of dollars and we split
the difference amongs us for all the work that we have done
in FreeBSD :)
Another way of looking at it, is that commericial interests may
not necessarily coincide with the efforts of volunteers or the
required environment may not be applicable to most programers; for instance,
support for T1 links, problems with the system when it has 128 users or
so. Should I go out and buy the necessary equipment to debug such
a problem? The other class of problems is the one that may required
hardware assist such as a Periscope.
Last but not least paying for support may get you into a higher priority.
Enjoy,
Amancio
>>> "Jordan K. Hubbard" said:
> > [ 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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