[business] Ægir Support Services

[Christopher Gervais]

The main takeaway from the Ægir Summit confab with Richard Stallman is that
we ought to be offering support to finance ongoing maintenance and
development of the project. "We" here being the Ægir Project itself,
whether directly or indirectly.

This makes perfect sense. It should open up a market that has heretofore
been vastly under-served: commercial and institutional users who have
neither the budget to hire consultants, nor the spare time, staff or desire
to become experts themselves.

Before, at and since the Summit, many project and community contributors
have talked about forming a consortium or cooperative to offer such
support. Let's agree to move forward with this, declare our interest in
participating and sort out how to proceed. I know that I'm eager to see
this move forward.

I believe it is important to build the service around offering support.
This should, in turn primarily finance the generally unappealing work of
maintenance and documentation. Developers like to work on cutting edge
features, and consulting clients are often willing to finance such work.
However, fixing bugs, writing and curating good documentation, code
refactoring and cleanup are all very difficult to justify spending IT
budget on.

Many active Ægir project and community contributors already offer hosting
and/or consulting services, including me. This endeavour must not seek to
undermine these established niches, but rather benefit them by growing the
market, and generating and referring *more* consulting and hosting business.

In fact, these very individuals and organizations, that already help to
drive the project forward, are the ideal participants in such a venture. I
invite all of them to join me in making this a reality. You can start by
declaring an interest to participate, and adding your thoughts to this
discussion.




Christopher Gervais  :|:  Principal,  Ergon Logic Enterprises
514.945.6442  :|:  christopher.gervais at ergonlogic.com
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