Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

["Lefty (石鏡 )" <lefty shugendo org>]

On 3/4/10 7:22 AM, "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier" <jzb zonker net> wrote:
> 
> Somewhere in there should be a self-sustaining model to raise money
> for the hosting and GNOME, and provide Free as in Freedom services for
> users in the bargain...

It's a nice idea, but I don't see any "self-sustaining model" that's
appreciably different than "buy a cloud server from Amazon, hire someone(s)
to administer and support it on behalf of a million different users with a
million different applications, and then charge those users a premium over
what they'd pay Amazon individually to make up the administration and
support costs and, ideally, leave a little money left over for GNOME."

I'm not sure that's realistic; I am, however, pretty well-convinced that
there's little likelihood of saving anyone any money there. For what it's
worth, I pay under $200 a year for what amounts to unlimited bandwidth
hosting for multiple domains on a virtual server with up to 20GB of space.
(A co-located, dedicated server will typically run anywhere from $200 to
$1000 a month, and up, exclusive of administrative costs, etc.)

I'm likewise not sure that simply having an interested group get together
and purchase their _own_ virtual server for their own uses is any more or
less "free" than another alternative...