Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling
On Thu, 22 Jul 2010, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:
> > That's an interesting idea. But where is the money going to come from?
>
> This idea is likely to get so much people against it that it's not worth
> discussing.
Involvement of Debian funds would cause problems, but there are other options.
We could have Debian maintain a list of consultants and companies that provide
phone and Jabber support. Also a mapping of consultants to areas of expertise
would be good (EG if someone happens to need some paid expert advice on Debian
SE Linux ;).
Maybe we could have an IRC channel where people could post questions like "I
want to pay $50 per hour to have someone fix a bug in my Perl code on
Debian/Lenny". If such a channel was available then I'd occasionally use it
for my clients, early last year one DD got a small series of $US100 contracts
through me that probably took him about 30 mins each to complete - that's a
rate of $US200 per hour and the client was totally happy!
With some of these jobs the faster the response is the more the client is
willing to pay. If you can fix something within the next hour the client will
often pay twice what they would pay to have it fixed tomorrow. In the past
I've had ongoing requirements for rapid expert advice on Perl in Debian/Lenny
and PHP with libraries backported to Lenny from Squeeze which I couldn't find
adequate resources in a small enough amount of time.
--
russell@coker.com.au
http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Main Blog
http://doc.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog
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