[CentOS] Official CentOS CD/DVD Vendor Program

Fri May 27 09:20:45 UTC 2005
Lance Davis <lance at uklinux.net>

On Fri, 27 May 2005 ago at 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


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