[Queue-developers] business model & GQ NOT dormant.

[wernerkrebs <wer...@ya...>]

Two things:

1.

In fact, GQ hasn't gone dormant.

If you take a look at http://www.gnuqueue.org, you'll
see that Mike's been pretty active in the CVS
repository.

Of course, as Eric S. Raymond points out in his famous
essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", in proprietary
software one only wants to a release when everything
is "perfect", whereas in Open Source development one
should "release early, release often." 

One can put out frequent development releases that are
just snapshots of the latest tarball, even when things
are not exactly perfect.

Which is sort of what the world expects, which is why
people think GQ is dormant. We're working on Mike to
make him a convert, and maybe we'll get a development
release that's a tarball snapshot.

That way, he'll get the credit he deserves for all the
hard work he's been putting into this behind the
scenes.

2.

You mention "market."

Some of the really successful open source projects
have come up with business models, enabling them to
get salaried programmers to work on the code.

There are a number of models. A business can see the
code base as a critical piece of its infrastructure,
and donate its own maintainance efforts to the Net. If
enough companies do this, an informal consortium of
cost-sharing companies becomes a formal consortium.
The Apache consortium started this way, and then IBM
came along and, I believe, actively funded the
consortium and optimized the NT port in exchange for
use of the code in some of its products, I think.

TI (or its subsidy Alantro) wanted to make GQ into a
software license system. I convinced them to modify
that in to a central resource control system for GQ,
which is now an optional part of the code base. So
that sort of happened for GQ.

In other models, the authors publish a book on the
software, and use royalties from the book to support
programming and marketing efforts.

Still another model, which might work for GQ, is that
an optional component is sold as proprietary, and this
is used to support the free, Open Source component.
For GQ, these could be fancy GUIs that allow
centralized control of large cluster, enhanced GQ
versions optimized for large clusters, or NT versions
"compatible" with the Unix cluster system. These
proprietary versions would create a revenue stream to
enhance the free, Open Source versions, which, in
turn, would create a larger potential user base for
the for-pay versions.

Currently, our "business model" is (almost) entirely
volunteer. Although some companies have contributed
code and bug-fixes developed by for-pay programmers,
Mike isn't getting paid for his efforts.

It would be great if we could have a salary for Mike,
or people under Mike somehow, but this is sort of the
model we're stuck with for now. 

(Maybe this will change with the next development
release once more people learn of the many
behind-the-scenes improvements Mike has made. >;->).

>John McKowen Taylor, Jr. wrote:
>
>
>> and GQ might as well be it!
>>
>> Please let me know if you have any questions or
>>comments.
>>
>
>Comment:
>    "the market is wide-open for a good, solid
>queuing product"
>    Amen.  Ain't that the truth, brother.
>
>John, I am looking forward to the results of your
>efforts.  It is 
>regretable that GQ has gone dormant.  Hopefully your
>efforts and 
>enthusiasm may yet breathe new life into the old
girl.
>
>Best wishes from one of the non-coders.
>
>    -Buckley




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