[OT]Re: Books...

[Yigal Chripun]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Lars,
> 
>> Well, there are quite a few successful companies which has such a
>> business model in the software business, so hardly what could be
>> called an experiment.
>>
>> All Linux distributing companies (RedHat, Suse/Novell, Canonical),
>> TrollTech with Qt, mySQL (you know the thing ;), eZ (ez.no), and many
>> many more.
>>
> 
> Most of those, IIRC, have a free version and a for sale version and they
> provide tech support only on the for sale one. That not quite what I was
> thinking. I'm thinking, no for sale version at all. The company would
> just have a donations page, and an explicit statement that donations can
> effect the priority of fixing particular bugs and whatnot.
> 
> 
I knew of a band that has exactly this model. they advertise on their
website the amount o money needed to record their next album (renting a
studio, and stuff like that) which surprisingly is in the range of
20K-30K$ (not millions as the record companies makes us think).
anyway, the idea is that the real fans, those that are willing to donate
money to the band have influence of the content of the album. so if all
the fans who paid want love songs, than the band will produce an album
of love songs. of course, the band reserves some creative judgment for
themselves.
Personally i'm not into that music so i don't know what happened to
them, but last time i looked at their site, probably a year ago, they
already had one album and half the money to produce the next one, or
something like that.