Re: Back to the Future of Swarm

[Scott Christley]

I can say the NET-Community would be more than happy to act as custodian to
Swarm; we now do much of the ObjC maintenance within GCC as well as a large
portion of GNUstep development, so we've attracted a number of good ObjC
programmers.

We are a for-profit company, and I couldn't say that a significant part of
the profit goes towards Swarm development.  However we are a free software
company, and this changes the business model from your more typical
proprietary (software hoarding) development company.  Our main revenue
sources are:

* Distribution of CDs.  Periodic, up-to-date, and ready to run.
* Support contracts.

Because of the nature of free software, we cannot rely upon the "upgrade
cycle" revenues; ie Microsoft sells you Word for $350, then tries to
convince you every 6 months to upgrade it for $100.  However, I like this
business model better because it focuses on what software is; it is a
service not a manufacturing product.  That means that if our customers
require more Swarm support (say) then that is where the resources will be
allocated.

I haven't looked at Swarm, so I don't know what license it falls under (GPL,
LGPL, BSD like?), but if its one of the GNU licenses then you can generally
be assured that the software will always be free, and that some commercial
company can't hoard the software and any changes they have made to it.

So I think that I offer a fourth alternative.  The non-profit company is a
good idea if you can guarantee that enough revenue would be generated to
keep it stable and offer competitive wages to developers.  You want your
revenue stream stable so that those developers can concentrate on Swarm
development, and not spending their time marketing and selling so as to meet
payroll.

I would be curious to know what people think about support contracts.  Would
you personally or would your department/school purchase a support contract
for Swarm?  What price point would make the contract acceptable?  $500/year?
$2000/year?  If you can get 25 contracts at $2000/year then you can talk
about supporting one full-time Swarm developer.

Scott