Hi All,
At some point in the future it's likely that I'm going to split Observium into free and enterprise/pro variants.
Observium has historically been developed as a fairly ad hoc project, with work being done as time permits between work projects. We've often had gaps of 6 months where there has been little work done due to other commitments.
As the user-base expands this is going to become less and less viable a way of maintaining the project, and we need to be able to devote more time to keeping on top of bug reports and feature development. To be able to devote more time to the project we need to establish a revenue stream to be able to support it.
We'd like comments from you guys about how we should go about splitting, what should be in each version, and what we should charge.
We're considering:
A hosts/ports-based licensing scheme, where you get a certain number free, and any more than that requires a license. A feature-based licensing scheme, where higher-value features such as load balancers, netapp, mac accounting, vpn tracking, etc require a license. Licensing for customer-access, where allowing customers access to the web interface requires a license.
What pricing models do you think would work?
Options for the ent/pro version include using the honour system, maintaining a separate password-protected SVN repository or distributing an ioncube-protected version.
I would prefer to go the honour system route, but I'm not sure how well that would work.
Thanks, adam.