All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
We currently have 3 vendors, and 2 more who are putting together their information. (Not bad ... the official program has been going for less than 12 hours :)
The details of the program (how to get in it, what they give back to the CentOS Project, etc.) are here: http://www.centos.org/images/CentOS_CD_Vendors.pdf
Here is the page that contains the current vendors: http://www.centos.org/vendors
The CentOS project has looked at the vendors listed, and we highly recommend them if you want to buy CentOS CDs or DVDs. They give back to the CentOS Project for every CentOS CD/DVD they sell and we greatly appreciate it.
If you are a CD/DVD vendor and are interested in being in our official program, see the above guide.
If you are a CentOS user looking to buy CDs or DVDs, please use our official vendors to get all your pre-made CDs or DVDs (not just CentOS products) ... and if you are buying other products from them because they are official CentOS vendors, let them know that is the reason :)
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Johnny Hughes wrote:
All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
We currently have 3 vendors, and 2 more who are putting together their information. (Not bad ... the official program has been going for less than 12 hours :)
The details of the program (how to get in it, what they give back to the CentOS Project, etc.) are here: http://www.centos.org/images/CentOS_CD_Vendors.pdf
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.
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?
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-)
Cheers,
C
On Thu, 26 May 2005, Chris Mauritz wrote:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
We currently have 3 vendors, and 2 more who are putting together their information. (Not bad ... the official program has been going for less than 12 hours :)
The details of the program (how to get in it, what they give back to the CentOS Project, etc.) are here: http://www.centos.org/images/CentOS_CD_Vendors.pdf
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.
That is reasonable given that they have to duplicate the cds, run a website, hold stock etc etc, and they dont have to give the project anything = they are in order to be listed on the website.
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?
paypal@centos.org
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-)
Well start up your own cd vendor then ...
Regards Lance
Cheers,
C _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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
Johnny Hughes wrote:
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.
Ah, I didn't realise that things had taken off to that degree. Again, the point of my original post was that I thought the people who were doing all the heavy lifting ought to make more than 8-10%. But given the numbers above, perhaps that's still going to be a fair amount of $$$. I'm just tickled the distro exists and I've given DVDs to a few people who have later decided to replace production Redhat servers with CentOS. I'll just have to encourage more of them to use the DONATE button on the website. I guess I just tune those buttons out over time. I didn't even notice them until I went hunting for them today.
Cheers and congrats!
Johnny Hughes wrote:
All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
Have you guys considered setting up a storefront like what's available at CafePress? I'm not suggesting selling CDs there, but a CentOS mug and some shirts would be pretty cool to have. Who knows, others might like them too.
Just a suggestion,
Shawn M. Jones
Some feedback..
You might wish to spellcheck the Vendor PDF..
Noticed this at first glance:
Your costumers can utilize all the CentOS support options ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Let's hope they are CUSTomers not COSTumers! ;-)
Hello list,
Some feedback.. You might wish to spellcheck the Vendor PDF..
Another feedback. I'm pretty mad right now.
I wrote a letter to Lance Davis how would I be able to distribute "official" CentOS and provide support to these sets. I didn't got the answer. OK, time told me (the CentOS_CD_Vendors.pdf to be more exact). I didn't wanted to be rude and don't want to flame the people who created the distro and organizing the developement and foundation but a simple answer would be helpful, eg. please, wait we're developing a
I didn't creted and sold the DVD sets because I don't wanted to do it without the permission or nod of the foundation/developers. I don't want to be rude to them as I respect them. I checked the mail server logs two times (rejection on the centos side, DNS errors, etc.) to be sure that the mail landed at least on CentOS mail server.
More problems: I told in the letters - I wrote two as I remember - that as a Hungarian I have problems with paypal. PayPal as worldwide as Hungarian language is a wordwide language. And I wanted to just send the first $24. It's still waiting. I would sell the copies of CentOS with this amount "built-in" to the price and give installation support to this. After that I would like to get some official receipt (you know, tax issues as I would do it as an LLC).
I wanted to know how would I be able to be listed on the official supporters page. What are the requirements etc. I didn't get answer.
I have an idea about more faster responses to security updates. Just take advantage of the timezones and if there's at least one responsibe team/person on every continent there's no nighshift and latency as there's 5 o'clock somewhere. I hope you know what I would like to tell.
Sorry, I didn't want to bring it to the list bit I'm a bit dissapointed. I don't want special treatment I just wanted a simple answer to the question how can I help CentOS too. If you tell me that "sorry, tight now it's a tight and firm development base and we don't want external supporters" maybe I won't agree with it but I could accept it.
bye, Ago
On Fri, 27 May 2005 ago@lsc.hu wrote:
Hello list,
Some feedback.. You might wish to spellcheck the Vendor PDF..
Another feedback. I'm pretty mad right now.
I wrote a letter to Lance Davis how would I be able to distribute "official" CentOS and provide support to these sets. I didn't got the answer. OK, time told me (the CentOS_CD_Vendors.pdf to be more exact). I didn't wanted to be rude and don't want to flame the people who created the distro and organizing the developement and foundation but a simple answer would be helpful, eg. please, wait we're developing a
I am sorry, but I get hundreds of emails every day, some even related to my day job that I earn money for , and they do not all get answered straight away,
With the best will in the world they get prioritized and those that can be dealt with straight away do get dealt with, others get left until later and some get forgotten.
It so happens that your email arrived at the time that I was dealing with a major server problem involving sleepless nights, wasnt straightforward to answer as we didnt have the facilities in place for CD vendors or support and so got left , but is still in my inbox so would have got answered soonish.
Some people send a gentle reminder - I sent you an email you have answered etc etc - that is a technique I recommend if you want to get to the front of the queue ...
I didn't creted and sold the DVD sets because I don't wanted to do it without the permission or nod of the foundation/developers. I don't want to be rude to them as I respect them. I checked the mail server logs two times (rejection on the centos side, DNS errors, etc.) to be sure that the mail landed at least on CentOS mail server.
There is no problem with creating and selling DVD sets - CentOS is GP free software.L.
More problems: I told in the letters - I wrote two as I remember - that as a Hungarian I have problems with paypal. PayPal as worldwide as Hungarian language is a wordwide language. And I wanted to just send the first $24. It's still waiting. I would sell the copies of CentOS with this amount "built-in" to the price and give installation support to this. After that I would like to get some official receipt (you know, tax issues as I would do it as an LLC).
That isnt a problem, we do have facilities for taking credit card payments through the company that sponsored the development of CentOS and can give an official receipt. I woill put something in place for that. South Africa has similar problems with paypal,.
I wanted to know how would I be able to be listed on the official supporters page. What are the requirements etc. I didn't get answer.
Because the requirements have not yet been worked into an oficial document ...
I have an idea about more faster responses to security updates. Just take advantage of the timezones and if there's at least one responsibe team/person on every continent there's no nighshift and latency as there's 5 o'clock somewhere. I hope you know what I would like to tell.
We already do that - but it takes a long time for people to buld up the level of trust required for us to allow them to post updates !!!
Sorry, I didn't want to bring it to the list bit I'm a bit dissapointed. I don't want special treatment I just wanted a simple answer to the question how can I help CentOS too. If you tell me that "sorry, tight now it's a tight and firm development base and we don't want external supporters" maybe I won't agree with it but I could accept it.
That is not the case at all ,the CentOS project is growing at a very rapid rate and we need all sorts of people doing all sorts of jobs - the developers are overworked - and have day jobs as well - maybe we should post a 'vacancies' page on the website.
The usual way to get involved is to read the mailing list or get on irc and start answering peoples questions ... or build stuff for contrib/centosplus ...
Regards Lance
On Fri, 27 May 2005 ago@lsc.hu wrote: I am sorry, but I get hundreds of emails every day, some even related to my day job that I earn money for , and they do not all get answered straight away,
OK, I understand this but the webpage mentioned your e-mail address. Just a tip: why don't you utilize some CRM about this topic or open a new forum for questions like this.
Some people send a gentle reminder - I sent you an email you have answered etc etc - that is a technique I recommend if you want to get to the front of the queue ...
Agreed. That's why I wrote the second letter :-) I think I dealt with the same problems like you when I didn't send the reminder (and I don't want to bugging people with lots of work).
Anyway, I started to mirror CentOS.org but there was a hard disk problem and it stopped me for a while. I just continoue it, soon.
There is no problem with creating and selling DVD sets - CentOS is GP free software.L.
I know. I could sell it anyway, I could create my own set I just wanted to respect your work and give more back to the "workers".
supporters page. What are the requirements etc. I didn't get answer.
Because the requirements have not yet been worked into an oficial document ...
sorry to hear it.
We already do that - but it takes a long time for people to buld up the level of trust required for us to allow them to post updates !!!
Yes, I know it that's why I asked the requirements to be "official". There's a good scheme worked out at Debian maybe CentOS could use it. Or develop and use another scheme.
And that's why I thought about bring LLC-s into the developement. The LLC-s are able to make contracts about what they are responsible for and if they are not doing their work they will be thrown out from the site, the "ring" etc.
The usual way to get involved is to read the mailing list or get on irc and start answering peoples questions ... or build stuff for contrib/centosplus ...
Almost all the required packages are built by others :-) :-( But I will try to find another work which doesn't require to be online all the day as I travel a lot to custmers sometimes.
bye, Ago
Johnny Hughes wrote:
All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
Have you guys considered setting up a storefront like what's available at CafePress? I'm not suggesting selling CDs there, but a CentOS mug and some shirts would be pretty cool to have. Who knows, others might like them too.
agreed. I bought relics at CafePress (ok, the last order, right now to my real Hungarian address and not to a friend in USA didn't get here 'til now).
But I like the idea and it's a good opportunity to support a project you like (just like Clamav etc.)
bye, Ago
ago@lsc.hu wrote:
All,
I would like to announce our Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program.
Have you guys considered setting up a storefront like what's available at CafePress? I'm not suggesting selling CDs there, but a CentOS mug and some shirts would be pretty cool to have. Who knows, others might like them too.
agreed. I bought relics at CafePress (ok, the last order, right now to my real Hungarian address and not to a friend in USA didn't get here 'til now).
If someone is willing to own this project, let me know. I know how to get ahold of one of the marketing guys there (have contact info) and can put you in touch.
J
Jonathan wrote: <SNIP>
Have you guys considered setting up a storefront like what's available at CafePress? I'm not suggesting selling CDs there, but a CentOS mug and some shirts would be pretty cool to have. Who knows, others might like them too.
If someone is willing to own this project, let me know. I know how to get ahold of one of the marketing guys there (have contact info) and can put you in touch.
J
Do I need permission to go forward on this if I can find the time?
--Shawn
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ago＠lsc.hu -
Chris Mauritz -
Johnny Hughes -
Johnny Hughes -
Jonathan -
Lance Davis -
Matt Bottrell -
Shawn M. Jones