[business] Ægir Support Services
Herman van Rink
rink at initfour.nl
Fri Aug 14 17:18:21 EDT 2015
On 14-08-15 06:51, Christopher Gervais wrote:
> 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.
>
I'm in.
I do however value my independence.
A Support Services could set baselines about what a client could expect,
while still leaving room to individual members to utilize their personal
strengths.
The 'easy' way from our side would be to direct a new prospect client to
one of the members, and let any contracts be directly between them.
For a client it might be more comfortable to get a contract with the
project's support organisation where they don't have to care who does
the work.
The last thing I would want is bad feelings between members, so we'd
have to devise some clear guidelines on who is responsible for what and
where the money flows.
--
Met vriendelijke groet / Regards,
Herman van Rink
Initfour websolutions
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