[reportlab-users] ReportLab Developer Network - RFC

[Andy Robinson]

Hi everyone.  I'd like some feedback on an important 
idea regarding our commercial software which I hope
will interest several people in this group.  It is 
just an idea at this stage.

--
In the last year we put 90% or more of our effort
into customer projects.  We survived the recession
and paid debts off, even added a lot of new 
functionality to our commercial products and some
to the free ones, but generally did a poor job of
documenting and packaging our software and supporting
the user group.

Some very good things have happened and we have
an exciting business plan in front of us. You will hear
a lot more about this in March.  One detail is that
we're going to put up the prices of our commercial 
software quite a lot to focus strictly on Enterprise
customers through a chain of resellers and integrators, 
and on licensing our formatting technology.

However, we'd like to enable those user group members who 
might contribute to us to get their hands on ALL of our 
commercial products at minimal costs, and even to use them 
in production in certain well-defined situations.  

We odten find it easier to make documents using our
standard methodology of "RML and Preppy" than in Platypus.  
Lots of people on this group have said "I'd like to use it 
but can't afford it" and it would benefit us greatly to
have smart Python programmers reviewing and testing these
products, telling us when the documentation is wrong
and generally testing very widely, as you do with the
open source toolkit.

I suggest creating a "ReportLab Developer Network"
which works as follows

- by application only - complete a web form, and approved
  at our discretion. 

- annual subscription of $1000-2000 for most users

- open to individuals, small firms, and universities 
  with enough knowledge of Python not to be a support
  burden to us :-)

- FREE membership for those willing to make a measurable
  and regular contribution e.g. packager/tester on some
  platform, contribute specific features, detailed
  reviewing or contributing to docco.  Note that this
  will need to be "re-earned" each year.  Some key contributors
  will be given membership in respect of work to date.

- receive licensed copies of ALL ReportLab products
  (RML2PDF, Diagra, PageCatcher) for development or internal
  use as well as lots of extra "things we're working on"

- for individuals, tiny firms doing Python work, "good causes" 
  and universities, we will often grant a production license for 
  one server or project.  This is the main benefit of joining.
  However, you have to tell us what the intended use is.  

- email address with guaranteed response and higher priority than 
  user group 

- login to our issue tracking system to raise and monitor
  support tasks (yes, this exists and it works, needs a couple
  of days work to be world-ready...)

- a business-oriented mailing list for any users who might class 
  themselves as "resellers" or "integrators" 

- structured space to submit examples, tips and so on


Revenue from this will be fairly directly allocated to
those things we have been doing badly:  actually working
on the "core"; support infrastructure improvements;
staff responding to user group enquiries; and ensuring 
our entire code base (free and commercial) is robust, 
documented and easy to deploy.  And these things
will benefit across Open Source and commercial products,
since all our commercial products have the open source
tools underneath them.


There are no promises this will happen - we will need board
approval by harder headed people than me - but if we are
going to do it then it must happen by end of March.
The extend to which it delivers is up to you, but if
20 firms joined at say $2000 then we could devote a
full time employee to the above tasks rather than commercial
projects, and make a real difference.

So, please let me know what you think and how this could
be made to work for you...


it-worked-for-MySQL-ly yours,

Andy Robinson
CEO/Chief Architect, ReportLab inc.