On Thu, 2005-05-26 at 13:34 -0400, Chris Mauritz wrote:
> What's the point? I checked out linux cd mall. They charge $12.50 for
> the CD set (or DVD) and CentOS makes ONE DOLLAR. Unless you envision
> tens of thousands of people buying CDs, it hardly seems like a
> worthwhile endeavor unless you're the CD distributor.
>
You may not understand the VOLUME of centos right now. We serve about
16 TB per month of data from just the internal centos servers. That is
just traffic for supplying updates to other public mirrors, Bittorrent
ISO seeds and up2date/yum run against our mirrors. That does not in any
way measure traffic of updates run against the 41 public mirrors.
In the last 2 months there have been 30527 CD SETS or full DVDs
downloaded from the CentOS BitTorrents totaling 62.96TiB. That does not
in any way measure the ISOs downloaded from the 41 public mirrors.
CentOS is very high volume right now ... and it is getting bigger
everyday. It takes money and resources to distribute at this level. We
need more of both.
Things that we need to do to take CentOS to the next level (developers
attending major Linux conferences/meetings, give away several hundred
CDs at those meetings, etc.) require us to be able to get money or
donated CDs. If we make $5,000/year ... that is alot of CDs we can give
away at conferences ... or a couple servers to share the mirror load,
etc.
> Why not just find a way to make it easier for people to donate directly
> to the project instead of creating a needless middleman who is taking
> 92% of the money for each CD/DVD set sold?
>
We have Donate Now buttons all over the website ... everyone, please
feel free to use them when ever they want :)
Profit is less than the full $12.00 ... there is time, shipping,
hardware cost, media cost, etc. We don't have anyone to do this, but if
you are volunteering, you can sell CDs for us :)
> Hell, for 92% of the profit, I'd be more than happy to sit at home and
> burn DVDs all day. Where do I sign? 8-)
Start a site, buy some cds and dvds and start :) ... if your customers
are happy, we will be too. Distributors can donate more than the
minimum amount , if they choose.
Some companies charge $12.95, others $8.95 ... they are all selling
CDs/DVDs already. Being that those companies do already exist ... and
that they are already selling CD/DVDs, why not have the CentOS project
get 8-10% of that money in return.
Some people like to buy their CDs or DVDs instead of burning them ... We
are not suggesting that they do that, but if they do buy pre-made CDs,
we are suggesting that they use our business partners.
Thanks,
Johnny Hughes
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