Re: [Qemu-devel] Donation model for opening the accelerator?

[Brad Campbell]

John Wells wrote:
> Have you considered allowing donations for open sourcing the accelerator? 
> In other words, setting up an account (maybe paypal), announcing the
> effort, and then when you receive $X in donations, opening the accelerator
> code.  I believe if I recall Blender used this exact same approach.

I was going to leave this alone, but I can't.
I currently own win4lin and win4linpro.
Both products I need to get my work done. I paid about $50 USD for win4lin and win4linpro is about 
$100 USD. I'm also using qemu and the kqemu kernel accelerator.

I would happily pay that much as a donation toward opening the product, in fact as I get older and 
actually realise the value of *free* stuff I use, I find myself throwing money at the author or his 
chosen sponsored cause.

Playing Devils advocate here. Lets say Fabrice puts a price of X on an free version of kqemu. And 
lets say over the next 9 months we reach 2/3X donations but never actually reach X. How many of the 
people that donated are going to be upset, get nasty and chuck their toys out of the pram?

WineX is a good example of that.

I, myself would not complain particularly. I'm using a product that does what I need, even if it 
uses a closed source kernel module. Hell win4lin is doing that now and I'm happy to pay for it. But 
is it fair to all other financial contributors?

Attracting commercial sponsorship is a good move.

Now, I have been using software that Fabrice wrote dating back to lzexe (which was just the ducks 
nuts for a poor student with a small hard disk), and I'd be happy to chuck some dosh his way any day 
of the week, but if asking for community sponsorship is going to defeat the goal of attaining 
commercial sponsorship then I can go with that too.

Seriously, as a company would you talk about stumping up the clams required to open a product if you 
knew the community was going to do it for you?

Regards,
Brad
--
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