|
|
James Yonan <jim@xxxxxxxxx> said: >So please consider making some kind of donation if OpenVPN is important to >you. And if you are business-oriented person, I would love to hear any >suggestions you might have on how some kind of business model could be >constructed around OpenVPN to ensure its financial survival. > I'm actively marketing an OpenVPN-based solution here in .NL (well, for some value of 'marketing' given that I actually have little budget for that ;-)). It isn't taking off, exactly, given that I'm mostly talking about teleworking and that teleworking is a luxury that lots of companies are postponing for economically better times, but I am quite positive that during the year, I'll manage to get some contracts (from there on, it's word-of-mouth that needs to do the job). I would think it only reasonably to donate a fixed percentage of revenue out of these contracts (10% was my idea - I'd like to donate more than that but I'm aiming at SME and I'm pitting my time against ever cheaper hardware-based solutions, so I have a very tight cost calculation). A possible business model around this would be to actively brand OpenVPN and make a sort of commercially-oriented website with success stories, solutions, and referrals to solution providers. Anyone who wants to be up on the site needs to a) pay a small fee to contribute in the site's costs, and b) pledge to pay X% of OpenVPN-related revenues. These companies could also pool up their private extensions: for example, I have created some - admittedly simple - scripts to generate OpenVPN configuration files for a whole project, including NSIS scripts which 'burn' customized installers for the PC's involved; also, a bit of documentation for end users. I'm reluctant to hand this off to the public because I need to differentiate, but if there would be such a site with more likeminded companies, I'd be happy to share it there (assuming that you would take care not to put too many competitors up there - I'm thinking especially for OpenVPN that you want regionally oriented shops because you want to have a quick on-site response time and security implies trust which often starts for SME with 'being a local'). -- Cees de Groot http://www.tric.nl <cg@xxxxxxx> tric, the new way helpdesk/ticketing software, VoIP/CTI, web applications, custom development ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Openvpn-users mailing list Openvpn-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openvpn-users |