[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Frank Griffin]

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