What is your answer to solve the top inhibitor for the Linuxdesktop adoption? (was Re: [Desktop_architects] Most wantedApplication: Email)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 09:13:57PM -0700, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday 03 January 2006 20:56, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > Hmm, do we have a feasible source for the monetary investment for this?
> > I'm guessing that something on the order of several million would be
> > required?
> 
> indeed...
> 
> <crazy thought process alert>
> 
> given that this is really a support service and support services are supposed 
> to be one of the "bread 'n butter" models of open source driven 
> business ......... i bet there's a business model in there somewhere ;) i 
> don't know if attempting to privatize it is really what we want, though.

I've been mulling on this idea a bit, of extracting the monetary support
from the content itself...

Using adsense as Mike suggests would be one way of achieving this, but
it occurred to me, why not do it even more directly?

Various online and print magazines and technical journals pay directly
for content such as what we're talking about.  Usually something on the
order of $300-400 for a typical article.  Maybe more for print
magazines.  Not necessarily enough to quit your day job, but certainly
enough to make it interesting.

Imagine that we got a list of topics that ISVs considering Linux ports
have been concerned about, and then recruited the respective domain
experts to write articles about them, and helped hook them up with an
editor interested in running a story on it.  We may also provide some
peer review / editorial support; this could be especially critical for
non-native english speakers or developers not yet confident about their
writing skills.  The deal we make is that we simply ask that they agree
to place their article under a specific license that is compatible with
the dev portal, about a month after publication, and that their article
include a link to the dev portal.  This way, the magazine gets a great
article, we get a great piece of content for the dev portal and a link
from a high traffic site, the writer gets his name out in print, a few
hundred dollars, immortal fame in the dev portal, and the knowledge that
in one small but significant way, he's helping push Linux adoption.  And
the ISV reader gains an interesting and informative article to read in
his favorite 'zine, plus will be able to access that information in a
centralized location ever thereafter.

Bryce