Re: multiuser scripts from a commercial vendor

[Michael P. <mp...@op...>]

>    Wow!!! I guess you beat me to the punch. I was planning to try to start
> a company to support this project... This just sends another stake
through my heart.

We are finding out the same thing that you noticed, no one seems to care
commercially about multi-user capability from a single box.  Unless you
have a free supply of reliable boxen to run LTSP, this is the best
solution for lots of applications but no one seems to see the advantages
yet.  While it might be our most unique feature, our company is about
getting pre-configured hardware and software combinations to users, and
the multi-user features has actually generated less interest than TV
tuners!

I would love to hire some people to work on the multi-user stuff, but
right now it is mainly marketing and sales that is required.  The
multi-user features only take up about %20 of our development time.  You
probably know about Userful, and their non-open source approach -- I think
they are having a hard time trying to sell stand alone proprietary
multi-user software. (They're probably reading this list and looking at
our scripts as I write this ;)
If you had the funding to hire people, I think there is room for a
multi-user open source software company to compete with Userful, and Open
Sense Solutions would actually purchase software and support from such a
company.  Userful has approached us to become their reseller, but we
cannot make such an important part of our product non-open source.

Maybe in a few months we could start contributing financially to this
project and hiring people or at least offering cash bounties for specific
functionality. If people have ideas or would like to help with
marketing/sales/advertising for the multi-user features we have a small
budget for that, and hopefully more sales will lead to a bigger
development budget.

Thanks,
Mike

-- 
Michael Pardee
Open Sense Solutions LLC
1-888-323-1742
http://opensensesolutions.com