[openbeos] Re: Couple of non-sequiters

  • From: "Scott MacMaster" <zqxh@xxxxxxx>
  • To: <openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 23:39:12 -0400

> Heh you all talk about investing, yet none of you suggest to invest it
> in the one thing that you all hope for the most :P
>
> Business investors are looking to put money into a company or project in
> the hopes that that project will then offer them a much better return
> further down the track.  Forget about earning a paltry 5%-15% from the
> money market, even worse if it requires people to divert their attention
> away from the project (lost opportunity cost).

I doubt it would divert the attention of people away from BeOS.  It would
give the non-programmers an answer to the very often repeated question,
"What can I do?"

> Invest directly into OBOS - buy specs, buy hardware for
> development/testing, buy licences to portions of code that cut
> development time - no point in wasting any money on promotion or
> advertising yet.  By all means set up a paypal donation box, maybe one
> per team or developer - this way the donator decides who gets the money.
>  Set up a foundation, trust organisation, whatever.. just make sure that
> you dont piss talented people off and cause them to leave the project at
> such an early stage (again the opportunity cost of them leaving far
> outweighs any cash being offered up).

I like this method.  Setup various donation boxes.  Let the people decide
what the best use of their money is.  If they want to donate money for
hardware let them.  If they want to donate money for long term investments
let them.  These donating boxes would be setup on a website, possibly
OpenBeOS.  Maybe even give an option for anyone to create a donation box.
Say someone gets a new piece of hardware that BeOS doesn't support.  They
can setup a donating box and put some money it in and wait for someone to
volunteer to write the driver.

A lot of details could be said about this but it's not useful to discuss
now.  Deciding to do this needs to be done first then the details can be
worked out.

> Alternatively this is where the beginnings of distro companies could be
> formed (ala mandrake,redhat etc) who can decide who to give money to as
> part of a business investment (in the hopes of making a return when they
> have a distro to sell).  Their decisions would hopefully be based on
> investing in the people that are most likely to produce a product sooner
> rather than later.  But to be perfectly honest, i dont see this route
> happening any time soon - at least not in a substantial manner that
> could even free up one developer fulltime from their dayjob.




Scott MacMaster
-----------------------------------------------------
me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.ScottMacMaster.com
www.CodeLiege.com


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