I'd go with annually payment or half-annually. So up to 100$ per year seems fair.
We already paying per quarterly when possible ;)
On 4/16/13 1:45 AM, Adam Armstrong wrote:
For the port-based model we would likely exclude virtual ports. It would likely only exist to catch users with 8 vss and 10k ports :-)
In terms of support and development, we would likely push all new feature development to the commercial version. Support and feature requests from licensees would be prioritised too.
This is already the case for our existing commercial sponsor. Roughly 50% of development work is directly requested features from them.
We certainly want to keep the free version usable, and we don't want to separate the code bases, as that would slow progress a lot.
I think the balance between keeping everything usable and maintaining a carrot to encourage people to license will be difficult.
Pricing is also difficult to decide on. If the majority of users won't pay, it will be higher than if we have more licensees.
If every user paid $10, we would probably be fine. I suspect not even 5% will be willing to pay, though.
Adam.
"Hibler, Florian" florian.hibler@kaiaglobal.com wrote:
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
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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.
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