Re: Back to the Future of Swarm

[Scott Christley]

At 11:12 AM 2/26/97 -0700, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

>But, most of us are cheap b*st*rds and aren't willing to
>pay $120 for a good pair of shoes, much less $1500 for a
>simulation package.

Which is why you create different support levels.  What you don't want to do
is underprice your product, you just lose money; instead you create various
degrees of support at different costs.  So there is the no strings attached,
minimal support, medium support, and mission critical support.  For the
company that doesn't blink at a $20,000 contract then you push why they need
the mission critical support and how medium support would leave them
unhappy; and you always leave open the possibility to customize a support
contract just for them.

There are two things, however, that I dislike about many commercial practices.

* Differentiation between education and commerical use.
* Per user pricing.

I think its ridiculous that a student can get a product much cheaper than a
home hobbyist.  What is the justification?  That individuals, who are really
commercial customers not home hobbyists, would buy the cheap version if they
could.  That's probably true!  But in my mind the differentiation is false;
it is also irrelevant when you are dealing with free software.  With
proprietary software, if the home hobbyist cannot afford the software well
then you've lost a customer.  If its free software, then they just go and
get the source code themselves; with proper support levels you at least have
a chance of drawing them in.

I also dislike per user pricing.  The common way to justify this is that the
more users the customer has then the more support resources they will need.
Possibly, it depends upon how you structure your support.  If any user can
call the support desk then yes you will likely have great demand; that is
why I have all my support contracts in terms of "contacts".  These are the
actual number of people who can initiate support calls.  So a company gets
charged for the number of contacts based upon their support level.  If a
company thinks that they can support 1000 user through a single support
contact then all the power to them; you just need to be very strict about
only working with that one contact.  Many larger companies already have an
internal support/help desk, so they more calls they handle for you the better.

Plus when you eliminate per user pricing; then you eliminate all of the
hassles and issues with copying and management of copies.  Its nice to say;
sure give it to any of your users.

>And, the objections to this are absolutely correct, the
>tightening of the beam focussed on commercial customers
>would eliminate alot of coverage of the broader public 
>audience.  But, what a company could ensure is that some
>measure of diffusion occurred *through* maintenance of 
>the tool.  After all, high quality software reduces the 
>amount of information it takes to use that software....
>maybe not by all that much...but it does reduce it somewhat.

I think Cygnus Solutions has done a pretty good job of balancing this with
their cygwin32 product (port of GNU tools to WIN32).  They have a healthy
public forum with alot of activity, many people submit patches and make
suggestions; yet they release all of the source code on a fairly consistent
basis which is identical to what they send to their paying customers.  The
main difference is that a paying customer is guaranteed a response time
regarding issues; while the public forum gets questions answered when they
have time.

What is most important is that "enhancements" made to the product due to
paying customers actually become available to the public.  Along this lines,
two things are critical.

* The copyright of the complete work is held by one entity.  This insures
that for specific customers (who have difficulties with free software), they
can be issued a more restrictive (proprietary) license.  This also means
that anybody who makes significant contributions to the source code must
assign the copyright to that entity for the contribution to be accepted; for
example FSF requires this for all GNU software.

* The code must be placed under a free software license that does not allow
other companies to sublicense it and make it proprietary.

ok back to work!
Scott