Hi,
Have you calculated how many dollars you need per year? Going from there and calculating backwards might be good strategy. You must have some stats from the svn repo how many unique IPs do 'svn up'. Are you today getting a lot of requests for a few hours of consultancy on an observium installation?
Earlier a remark was made that complicated licensing schemes suck, something like "costs 2500 euro per year boss - flat" is appealing, also it will make your license enforcement much simpler, as you don't have to do weird things with the code so people don't add more than X ports or X devices. A nice aspect of observium is that most people can easily tweak/finetune some parts of the code for their particular environment, binary blob distributions would take that away.
Features for paying customers could be: - heavier voting rights (paying customers priortize the todo queue) - support response within X business hours - X hours of remote support (more hours @ discounted rate) - decent alerting - API to intergrate observium with existing backend/CMDB (API to add, delete & report on devices/ports)
But to be honest, I am unsure if this is a viable model.
You could also take a look at ISC's spinoff to make BIND financially more viable: http://www.dns-co.com/solutions/bind/
Kind regards,
Job
On Apr 15, 2013, at 12:58 AM, Adam Armstrong adama@observium.org 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. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium