techspring

As someone living in the exurbs of Detroit, this is something I've been familiar with for a few years. It's mostly common in the more rural areas, but it does creep into suburbia from time to time. See also: "brodozer"

I bought a Precision laptop preloaded with Ubuntu about 8 months ago and it's been awesome. The only problem I've run into is that I completely lose audio every time I reboot. A quick visit to alsamixer resolves the issue though, so not a huge deal.

I like this, but I can imagine it being a hard sell even at just 5%.

That's fair. My observation is admittedly entirely anecdotal.

In general, my thought is that by finding an unobtrusive way to generate revenue you can devote more time to the project and produce a higher quality, better supported product. This of course necessitates that the project is valuable enough to justify spending additional resources on making it significantly better.

In my mind, the best revenue model for OSS is something that is opt-in. For example, if a company wants to pay for enhanced support they can, but if not they can use the software and rely on community/best-effort support.

The main goal in my mind should be making greater resources available to the project while still allowing free use.

I considered not replying to this just based on the tone, but here we go. If I (theoretically) charge large corporations for SLA support, that means I can devote more time and effort to the project which remains free to use for the collective. The result is a higher quality product with better support at no added cost to anyone but those that desire a higher level of support. Does that make me (again, theoretically) a self serving greedy objectivist dick?

I typically start a docker container running the DB that I need and then import a backup of any existing data. This could be taken even further by keeping an image with the current version of the DB in a private registry, so developers can pull down the latest and spin up within a few minutes.

Thanks! Did you already have some audience to start with (i.e. blog readers, Twitter followers, etc) or were you starting from scratch?