Hi! John: > It sometimes takes an essential goodness-of-spirit to work on free > software; a belief that the world is at root a good place and that if > we all cooperate it will get even better. When you see an apparent > conflict between that and survival fears, my recommendation is to > stretch your understanding of the nature of the world, and the nature > of survival, if you can, rather than to become meaner (stingier) in > spirit. I just nursed another friend through an attack of > mean-spiritedness, and we found a much better path than by chucking > the free software nature of their product. Chris: > That's beautiful, John. But it's hardly a rational economic argument. Yes it is beautiful. It kind of sorta works since it is a major ammount of work to get a company going and selling support and products that one realy believes in has helped to keep me going. The free part has only given say 1/5:th of our companies direct incomes so far but it has given us PR. We have not had it as easy as Cygnus and US based companies since this business idea is more mature in US and it is probably easier to find customers who dosent cringe on the idea that something free can be good. But it is going in the right direction, especially Linux and Internet services are spreading the recognition of free software. The "unfree" are spending major bucks on advertising and trying to capture the market so it sure is intresting to follow. Free software is also more fun, I hope that can help us some in the future with getting good people since competent people are going to get scarse. We are only nine employees yet, so far it has been easy to find good people. What has worked best for us so far is Linux support and our internet server Readynet. We have developed a graphical administration tool in Tcl/Tk that takes care of system setup, user adding and removal, DNS, email, news, www, ftp, gopher, proxy services and modem pool setup with fixed and dynamic IP numbers. It runs both on Linux and Sun Solaris. We have a decent number of installations that we support via the net and it is easy enough for people not knowledged in Unix to use and unskilled people can use the email and user adding/removal functions. Unfortunately you have not heard much about it since the user dialogue so far is in Swedish since all our paying support customers are Swedish schools, cities and companies. Having this Readynet product has helped our consulting sales and we have also used parts of it in our consulting works like when we recently set up web services for a bank. We are thinking a lot about how to sell this support product abroad. In Sweden we have started to cooperate with resellers that sells our product, hopefully with added value for the customer in the form of email and web clients, trains the personell, fixes their pysical network and so on. They get a good commission(right word?) on the price and we deliver all the support. We are better technicians then salespeople and it is easier for us to find and value the skill of technicians then salespeople. We got a "demo" of readynet on http://www.signum.se/readynet and the source can be fetched on ftp.signum.se Regards, --Free software--I Magnus Redin I WWW http://www.signum.se/ Ibland får man I Signum Support AB I email redin@signum.se mer än vad man I Teknikringen 8 I fax +46 (0)13 214700 betalar för. I S-583 30 LINKOPING I tel +46 (0)13 214600