Microcontrolled could focus on his real paid-for offering - consulting service. Instead of outlining a list of chips he supports, how about identifying the kinds of things he could do for a customer? Prototypes, one-offs, PCB layouts, etc. Explain how the process works (scope of work is defined, quote is prepared, payments are made, deliverables are provided) or simply a time and materials basis. Turn to existing customers (I'm one) and leverage a reference from them for other customers.
What I outline above is a standard consulting practice.
Yesterday I met with an engineer who would gladly pay for a gold-standard assortment of OBEX objects, however.
If my opinion counts, the consulting practice is an awesome idea.
KK
Yesterday I met with an engineer who would gladly pay for a gold-standard assortment of OBEX objects, however.
Sounds like there is real money available if you are willing to rewrite the obex into a well documented standard format and sell it as a library. nothing in MIT against that.
OK, due to public opinion and my personal love of building things, I would like to start consulting, where would I even start on a consulting practice?
As for the site, I will use your ideas and it will remain functional.
Rather than a forced payment, why not have a Code Repository with a "contribution licence". That is, if you feel that the code is good enough for you to use, then you can opt to pay a nominal donation to the author to further develop & enhance the code and fund them to do more interesting things. That way we fund innovation, help to subsidise the time people spend, which in turn drives them to produce better quality code. This too could go for in depth documentation/etc. where people find it incredibly useful. As it would be up to the user to determine if there was value then it's easier to manage. Your site could be the donation management vehicle. You could manage stat's like top 10 SW sales, and top 10 donators, etc. You'd likely see volume, and seeing that it pays for innovation people are more likely to contribute.
Personally, I'd happy pay Ray a couple of $ to use his PDB display driver, and pay the author of the SD card driver. As long as it was voluntary, and it was a nominal amount where it's a couple of bucks then I could justify it.
A further enhacenement would be a licence that enforced payment if you used the code in a commercial product, then there would be a scaled licence fee per unit.
Be warned though, writing your own ecommerce site is likely to get you hacked. Make sure you visit www.owasp.org and understand how to write a secure site, otherwise you'll just be compromising visitors and paying malicious folks the donations.... sigh
it is not to difficult in PHP to write a hack safe sight if you are careful. It is absolutely important to check all user imputable data for correct values and when ever possible don't even send the user data they don't need. Even if you think a field could not contains something wrong(say a check box) it can if someone is trying.
Best practice is to write a few standard handling wrotines.
I.E.
inputRestrictNum(str)
inputRestrictAlpha(str)
inputRestrictFloat(str)
...
added benefit to this is since all user input is a string to start these routines can type cast it for you.
Also don't duplicate code. Use a library instead.
I have already given micro some pointers on password, and file safety.
This might be a tad off topic, but it still pertains to the issue at hand.. I believe the software industry is analogous to motion picture industry(And the music industry for that matter)... If all software was free there would be no money in it therefore, no one would make software. It is the same thing with the movies...I don't know about you, but i like watching blockbuster, special effects laden, commerce generating movies. I can't stand most indie films...I would rather use Windows than Linux, and not because i don't like Linux, but rather Windows is easy to use and it has a reputation(Perhaps not as good as it used to be)... I like the open source software thing....Kinda like i wish new PS3 games were not 60 bucks!!! But could i make a PS3 game like Call of duty??? Probably not. Who are we to deny somebody the right to make a living??
@zoopydogsit: I have thought about this, but after talking to Hanno a while back, he told me that when he originally released Viewport it was free, and he had a large "Donation" box on the download page. Eventually there were over 1,000 downloads and he had $0 in donations. Then he started charging, and now he has a mini-company called Hannoware that he is very successful in.
When on my site, if you want to have a donation driven object, check the "FREE" checkbox on the Upload Program page and a donation button will be added on the description page next to the download link.
I wasn't aware of Hanno's situation, then again VIEWPORT is a serious application. I was intending this to be for smaller working code items like Raymond PDB? Driver for his 4.3 displays. Or the SD card driver. By providing a way of donating then you'd give the users a way of giving something back.
I'm serious about the donation site, I've seen this done in the past by the Samba team. Essentially in their code they say, if you like what we've done and want to help use to innovate further then please donate to our Pizza fund. The money would go to an account for their team at the local Pizza resturaunt for a monthly get together.
You could provide a similar service. Allowing folks to reward people like Ray, and others for their dilligence, innovation and time. Though you'd need to consider giving them options for the use of their donations, ie. real dollars (may have tax implications), Parallax product credit, or even contribution to their local (they name) resturaunt where they could redeem with their family and friends, or where they could make it go their charity of choice.
All they'd need to have is a banner on the top of their code telling folks that if they would like to make a donation to continue development then they go to your site to do it.
You'd need to be open to external audit - which would be the case for any payment handling site. You'd probably just do the payment aspect through PayPal so that you wouldn't have to bother with PCI compliance.
This could be a workable model, and while it's unlikely to make anyone millions, it may help to prompt folks to produce and share their code and further drive the community spirit which has made the prop ("Alien Tech") so popular in the forum.
Comments
If my opinion counts, the consulting practice is an awesome idea.
KK
Sounds like there is real money available if you are willing to rewrite the obex into a well documented standard format and sell it as a library. nothing in MIT against that.
As for the site, I will use your ideas and it will remain functional.
Rather than a forced payment, why not have a Code Repository with a "contribution licence". That is, if you feel that the code is good enough for you to use, then you can opt to pay a nominal donation to the author to further develop & enhance the code and fund them to do more interesting things. That way we fund innovation, help to subsidise the time people spend, which in turn drives them to produce better quality code. This too could go for in depth documentation/etc. where people find it incredibly useful. As it would be up to the user to determine if there was value then it's easier to manage. Your site could be the donation management vehicle. You could manage stat's like top 10 SW sales, and top 10 donators, etc. You'd likely see volume, and seeing that it pays for innovation people are more likely to contribute.
Personally, I'd happy pay Ray a couple of $ to use his PDB display driver, and pay the author of the SD card driver. As long as it was voluntary, and it was a nominal amount where it's a couple of bucks then I could justify it.
A further enhacenement would be a licence that enforced payment if you used the code in a commercial product, then there would be a scaled licence fee per unit.
Be warned though, writing your own ecommerce site is likely to get you hacked. Make sure you visit www.owasp.org and understand how to write a secure site, otherwise you'll just be compromising visitors and paying malicious folks the donations.... sigh
Best practice is to write a few standard handling wrotines.
I.E.
inputRestrictNum(str)
inputRestrictAlpha(str)
inputRestrictFloat(str)
...
added benefit to this is since all user input is a string to start these routines can type cast it for you.
Also don't duplicate code. Use a library instead.
I have already given micro some pointers on password, and file safety.
When on my site, if you want to have a donation driven object, check the "FREE" checkbox on the Upload Program page and a donation button will be added on the description page next to the download link.
I'm serious about the donation site, I've seen this done in the past by the Samba team. Essentially in their code they say, if you like what we've done and want to help use to innovate further then please donate to our Pizza fund. The money would go to an account for their team at the local Pizza resturaunt for a monthly get together.
You could provide a similar service. Allowing folks to reward people like Ray, and others for their dilligence, innovation and time. Though you'd need to consider giving them options for the use of their donations, ie. real dollars (may have tax implications), Parallax product credit, or even contribution to their local (they name) resturaunt where they could redeem with their family and friends, or where they could make it go their charity of choice.
All they'd need to have is a banner on the top of their code telling folks that if they would like to make a donation to continue development then they go to your site to do it.
You'd need to be open to external audit - which would be the case for any payment handling site. You'd probably just do the payment aspect through PayPal so that you wouldn't have to bother with PCI compliance.
This could be a workable model, and while it's unlikely to make anyone millions, it may help to prompt folks to produce and share their code and further drive the community spirit which has made the prop ("Alien Tech") so popular in the forum.