Re: [Gnumed-devel] How much does GNumed cost ?

[Jim Busser]

On 2009-12-31, at 5:48 AM, Sebastian Hilbert wrote:

GNUmed is FOSS. It is therefore free as in freedom. It is however not free in
terms of free beer. For the last five years we have decided to operate a
dedicated server that would host stuff such as

GNUmed wiki
GNUmed Live CD
GNUmed movie downloads
CVSmonitor
GNUmed sources

as pointed out, we would also require a public database. Is the current one presently hosted on some another machine?

That server costs money. Roughly 5000 Euro have been paid over the 5 year
period to the hosting company to make that possible.

For 2010 we will have to find a way to reduce that cost or come up with
funding.

can the costs be broken down into

minimum basic

add-on options

bandwidth

Hosting content on other resources such as savannah or sourceforge. Scraping
everything that is not possible on a free hosting site. I believe Wiki should
be possible on many hosting offers

OSCAR put their manual on Google sites:

https://sites.google.com/site/oscarusermanual/

an overview of what Google makes possible is at

http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html

but CVSmonitor will die along with Live-
CDs.

CVSmonitor is nice, but do we use it? Do external sites monitor such things as savannah project activity?

LiveCDs are nice, but does anyone request them?

Maybe we could relocate all scripts for things like nighly tarballs and
nightly documentation as well Live-CD building to a local box and only upload
the results.

Options for funding are selling various goods such as

Live-CDs
GNUmed on USB-drives
Stickers and whatnot

The project cannot escape the need for *some* kind of monetization. However, I suggest any monetization not occur "nilly-willy" but deliberatively and co-operatively. Can I suggest we consider some alignment (and separation) between what the "project" would agree and seek to monetize, and what individual support companies may agree and seek to monetize?

I do not believe in donation buttons because you need a user base for that.
Second we don't ask for money but should build a business on what has been
achieved so far.

Agree it is all about incentives, and better resolving what it is that constitutes "value" for people.