El jue, 11-02-2016 a las 14:52 -0500, Martin Owens escribió:
On Thu, 2016-02-11 at 20:38 +0100, Sebastian Zartner wrote:
as I assume the network infrastructure wouldn't allow a huge amount of daily downloads.
As mentioned before, the network infrastructure is serving 40TB a month from our live website. (That's the equivalent of 950,000 downloads of the windows installer per month) which is A LOT. (please don't use this as a statistic, the logs tell a more direct picture that's not that high.)
I insist that a charging for binaries could be an excellent way to get funds to get funding for the less sexy tasks (the ones that take away fun from working in free-software projects). What about a "pay what you want" model starting by 1 usd? Not comfortable with that? What about a pay what you want, and a part of that money goes to a charity, as Humble Indie Bundle does?
This is not necessarily incompatible with the GPL, as you can still offer the sources freely to let people and linux distributions build their own packages. It's just charging a tiny wee bit to the users for the convenience of packaging the software for them (which is also a task that is not exactly fun for people to do).
Some of the money could go to Partha or whoever wants to put the builder hat, and the rest could go to fund hopefully full time developers for the non-fun parts of the project.
Gez.