Why is there no Fedora Project Store?

[David Nalley]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 11:55 AM, Michael Dinon <mdinon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> First off appologies in advance if question has been covered before and this
> isn't the right list, has there ever been any thought to have a Fedora store
> where proceeds from T-Shirt, laptop bag, stickers, and coffee mugs could
> benefit the Fedora project?  Basically something like the store for the
> GNOME project.  I am sure there must be a good reason why this doesn't
> already exist for the Fedora project, but I haven't found it as of yet.  Oh
> and yes I know of the Red Hat mini Fedora store.
>
> --
> Mike
>
> --
> marketing mailing list
> marketing at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
>

So we've had numerous opportunities and even sub-projects attempting
to do so but it boils down to a few issues.

The biggest is, we have no way do handle inbound money. Fedora is
legally a non-entity. So RHT is the de facto entity when Fedora comes
up, and the landscape for dealing with sales and corporate taxes is so
laden with landmines that every time we've discussed taking money it
appears impossible even from outside of RHT, I can only imagine there
are RHT-Finance and RHT-Legal types that automatically begin consuming
antacid when it's brought up. :)

The second is, for expansive web stores like Mozilla and Ubuntu have
it requires a large commitment upfront, and management fees. This is
effectively 25% of Fedora's annual disretionary budget. While it's
likely that we'd recoup some if not all of that money, it's a big
chunk of change, and one does have to question if the return on
investment would be worthwhile.

Fedora-fr maintains a spreadshirt site in France, but it's largely
shirts and clothing. Fedora's regional ambassadors do produce large
amounts of swag including, bathrobes, shirts, tattoos, buttons,
stickers, case badges, etc. These are freely given out at events that
fedora appears at.

--David