[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Fri Oct 1 03:50:52 CEST 2010

Graham Lauder wrote:
+> In a phrase: Horse Doo doo
+[....]
+
+> Mageia has a donation system
+>   
+
+[....]
+> We do this because at the end of the day infrastructure costs, marketing 
+> costs, a whole pile of things cost.  One day some patch or application, which 
+> is essential but completely non-sexy could require us to pay a dev on contract 
+> and so on and so forth.  
+>
+> Now our problem is that in these days of "everything free off the Internet" 
+> getting Koha is problematic. However there is, obviously, a proportion of the 
+> market that is willing to give Koha.  That proportion in a market is generally 
+> but arguably fixed, so the bigger the market the greater the Koha.  Our 
+> advantage is that our "costs" vary little with the size of the market.
+>   
+
+I'm not exactly ignorant of Economics 101, having been in this business
+(on the commercial side) for about 35 years.  :-)
+
+You make my point exactly.  The infrastructure costs are fixed, and the
+donor pool will be larger if the user base is larger.  You can either
+choose to entice people to donate because of their perception of the
+slant (market vision) of the distro, or you can entice people to donate
+because they find the distro useful to them personally (otherwise known
+as pseudo-shareware).  If you narrow the audience using the former
+approach, you're excluding potential contributors.  I was a member of
+Mandriva Club for years because I thought Mandriva worth supporting; I
+never bought a PowerPack or a Box Set because I never needed that
+stuff.  If MDV had trumpeted itself as a KDE-only Family (or Education,
+or whatever) distro, and reinforced that by excluding packages and
+infrastructure support for other stuff, I wouldn't have given a dime.
+
+
+> There is already a way of doing that, it's called OBS (OpenSUSE Build service, 
+> it's free software, install it or in fact use it) and with that and SUSE 
+> Studio, OpenSUSE have that corner of the market targeted and nailed.   
+>   
+
+Except that they don't have the tools that we have.  The software
+packages are common to every distro.  The tools aren't.  The key to
+whether someone would use OBS or ours (or even OBS ported to use our
+packages) is the quality of the packages (currency, stability) and the
+quality of the distro tools.
+"Focus" is all about excluding "non-essential" activities so that a
+company can focus its limited resources on the desires of a specific
+market.  A community distro is about servicing the largest possible
+community and providing a base from which others (including ourselves)
+can specialize.  The assumption is that the community will supply the
+manpower needed to achieve the objectives they want achieved, and if you
+think that the potential developer contributor pool gives a rat's
+whatever about targeted "image" distros that don't satisfy their
+specific needs, then you don't know developers.  And I would seriously
+question the assumption that 20-something families looking for commodity
+computing are going to become a significant donor base; that might
+happen if they were required to pay for it up front, and if their desire
+to buy it was great enough, but if they can get it and install it for
+free, they're outta there after that.  Your contributions are going to
+come from people who have a longer-term view or an investment in the
+health of the distro.
+
+Cheers,
+Frank
+