Hi Adam,
thanks for telling the list about your thoughts on commercializing
Observium and giving us the opportunity to talk about the licensing
scheme before you actually decide which way to go.
I need to agree with Nikolay, that "port-based" shouldn't be the way to
go, as many devices just add tons of virtual ports. For me "host-based"
sounds pretty fair.
Also I would prefer to use the "honor system" route as well. Keepeing
the source code open makes it still easy for people to contribute to
certain features or customize Observium for their own needs. Once a
product is commercialized you will have piracy, thats what I am pretty
sure of. Although I am pretty sure that this community will honor your
work and what you have done. Observium is a great product and it helps
me with my daily work.
Can you already outline some pricing you have in mind and/or the
differences between free/pro/enterprise editions? Once there is money
behind that whole thing, what would actually change? How would you deal
with the support, feature requests, etc.?
Just my 2 cent and hope it was a bit helpful!
Best regards,
Florian
--
Florian Hibler
Chief Technical Officer
eMail: florian.hibler@kaiaglobal.com
Kaia Global Networks Limited
Internet:
http://www.kaiaglobal.com
Company No. 08257877
Registered Office: High Wycombe, UK
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On 4/15/13 24:58, Adam Armstrong wrote:
>
> 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.
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