[IAEP] Sugar Labs or Sugar Daddy

[Martin Langhoff]

*Big Bold Disclaimer - these opinions are strictly Martin's. No
statement here is formal, I'm just waiting for a timing-bug to rear
its ugly head.*

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 10:25 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> I am convinced that the correct business model for Sugar Labs, will be
>> a combination of licensing the Sugar and Sugar Labs brands to partners
>> and donations.

I agree with David. The Moodle model is very strong, and if handled
with the right spirit most of the concerns over
"overcommercialisation" can be assuaged. (Those concerns, by the way,
are present in *any* model.)

Of course, I mean it as an inspiration around the "use the TM to
protect your name, convey prestige and establish some cashflow" - it
could be done as a non-profit or as a small company with a mission
statement -- with all/most of the $ raked in directed to Sugar
development (in its many aspects, sw, translations, docs...!). Maybe
you can have both -- a for-profit and a non-profit (maybe software
conservancy can fill that spot).

One lesson learned -- lawyers will tell you that you must protect the
TM with C&D letters. They are right -- you'll lose the TM otherwise,
the trademarks of Linux, Apache, PHP, etc are similarly protected.
However, it's a good idea to draft a relatively friendly C&D (the
lawyer won't like it though), and to also provide strong public
guidelines on what is acceptable use. This is so community members,
some of which can be professionals doing consulting around Sugar, know
how they can advertise their work while respecting the TM.

A few years ago an extremely positive and helpful member of the moodle
community got a C&D, didn't like it (it was strongly worded as written
by a lawyer, and posted by someone who didn't know who this guy
was...), and the resulting misunderstanding and protracted flamewar is
still going on. At least 3 years, and he's still annoyed enough to
post a few times per week to his blog about it.

The lesson was learned but we all lost a valuable colleague, and time,
lots of time.

> I am convinced that the Red Hat and IBM models are more relevant.

Ed, have you been a customer of RH or IBM recently? RedHat's current
model is pay-high-support-license-per-machine-to-play. It works great
for their target market, and it's a very valid (and profitable!)
model, but I see no overlap with SL's space. Maybe their old model
could be interesting to look at, but marginally so.

And yet, RH built a reasonably strong community. IBM's model is high
prices for custom development and support, highly restricted, and zero
community.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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