Turning off Paid Adverts for Sponsored Media

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Good discussion.  My $0.02 inline.

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Stephen Krenzel wrote:

> I agree, but no one is going to give any money as long as Fedora is
> perceived to be backed by Red Hat.

Nope.  No one's going to "give money to Fedora."  Especially not if we put 
it that way.

The question real question looks more like this: "you've come to this site
to buy a DVD for $10.  Will you pay another $10 to send a DVD to someone
else?  Since you've already got your credit card out, and all?"

And that's a proposition that I think people *will* warm up to.  Maybe we
can sweeten the pot by adding "...and by the way, if you do, you also get
this kick-ass bumper sticker that says 'I gave the gift of Fedora'."

> I have to admit, Fedora *is* Red Hat's baby, just as Ubuntu is
> Shuttleworth's baby, and OpenSuse is Novell's baby. I don't think that a
> lot of people would donate to any of these projects, except for a few
> exceptions.

I have a constant barrage of people asking "how can I help Fedora?  I 
don't code, I don't write docs, and I don't have the time to file bugs, 
but I love what you guys do.  Can I help somehow?"

I want the answer to be "hell, yes.  You can give the gift of Fedora, and 
it's dead simple.  Cost you, like, ten bucks, and you also get a wicked 
cool bumper sticker."

> If OpenSuse started asking for money, people would laugh, a similar
> outcome would result with Fedora as well. 

Depends on how you ask.

> I'm not sure what kind of resources it would take, but getting Red Hat
> or some other organization to donate a chunk of cash to Fedora so that
> we could give away free CDs ( similar to Ubuntu ) is the only way I
> really see any of these media plans working. Ubuntu set the "media
> distribution" bar high, and we aren't anywhere near it right now. 

I do know what kind of resources it would take -- and it takes plenty.  
We're not equipped to do it properly.  Simple as that.  Red Hat, as a
small publicly traded company, has responsibilities for the money we
spend, in a way that a billionaire hobbyist does not.

Moreover, the Ubuntu plan presumes that you're going to get *lots* of DVDs
and distribute them all yourself.  Great for LUGs and such... but for
novices who are looking to get their feet wet, I don't think this model
scales.  I think that Sponsored Media, done properly, could.  Especially
in developing countries.

> I don't think it is reasonable, nor wise, to ask someone to sit on a
> waiting list, especially when they can just go to a different
> distribution's site and be guaranteed a cd in a relatively short period
> of time. 

If Distributed Media is successful enough, we should be able to keep a
fairly short queue.  If we're *very* successful, we should be able to
drive a neagtive queue.  And by the way, the first time I requested Ubuntu
DVDs, it took them four months to arrive.  Your mileage may vary.

> We simply are not being competitive enough in this aspect of marketing
> Fedora. This is not to put down the efforts that Fedora has made thus
> far, but until someone finds a way to allow free CDs (or a dvd) to be
> distributed for free upon request, our efforts will be compared to
> Ubuntu's and claimed to be second rate at best.

Then we'll have to live with that -- because all those CDs and DVDs cost
money.  At Red Hat, we can either ship 50,000 DVDs all over the world, or
we can pay a world-class open source engineer.  Our success to date is a
direct result of our ability to answer that question correctly.

--g

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