Open Source Company Explores CwF+RtB In Getting Sponsorship For Whitepaper
from the attention dept
Ezra Gildesgame writes in to let us know that their open source development firm was inspired by the whole CwF+RtB concept to try to find a different way to fund a whitepaper on Drupal Security. The "tweak" they made was "connect with fans + reason to sponsor," and they were able to find sponsors to fund the whitepaper, while keeping the content free and building up greater connections. Of course, some will note that finding a "sponsor" for a whitepaper is hardly a new idea -- and that's absolutely true. Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy doesn't necessarily mean doing something "new" or totally out of the ordinary. It's about looking at what's available, and how it can be used more efficiently. In this case, they realized that they had built up a great community, and their attention (a scarce resource) would be of tremendous interest to some sponsors, which made for an easy sell to the sponsors. Either way, it's nice to see folks inspired to do things based on what we talk about.
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Filed Under: business models, cwf + rtb, sponsorship
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Yeah...
If there is a security problem with their software: 'it is not our fault, it is you job to keep it secure' (in case of xmlrpc).
As soon as the core modules get upgraded again: 'oh you can't load images: it is the job of the module writer to keep up in sync with us'.
Com'on, keeping a content management system running like that where the developers refuse to take up their responsability is far from 'connect with the fans' and it certainly is not 'a reason to buy'.
They might indeed 'force' people into paying for such a whitepaper because otherwise those people will not know how to keep the software secure. I would however not conclude that this is a CwF+RtB argument is. It has more to do with coercion than anything else.
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Re: Yeah...
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Re: Yeah...
And when core modules are upgraded the instructions urge you to test an upgrade and make sure nothing is interrupted before you actually perform the upgrade on a live server, you know.
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Yeah, the continuation
I personally tried to use Drupal: it didn't work for the reasons I mention. Why other people use it ? Good marketing ? or, 'Drupal consultancy' costs were among the lowest or ... well, I don't know, you should ask them. However, there can be many reasons why people choose a certain product, but in case of Drupal it certainly isn't for the quality of the software.
You argument, based on namedropping is no argument whatsoever.
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Yeah.. 3
I'm of course interested in things offline, however, if it doesn't work you expect some easy way to get it working. Testing things offline is to avoid diusaster. With Drupal it means: I need to figure out how all these existing modules will work in the new system, and whether they are still suported or not, in which case you can start wondering about the upgrade procudere or transition procedure. That is too much work for many system admins. I had by the way the same experience with zope. That also had this type of plugin systems that would never upgrade properly.
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RTFA
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Re: RTFA
From all content management systems I tried, Drupal has been the second worst. That there now is a need for a paper on security issues towards resellers doesn't surprise me. They too probably get questions about security. However, talking about security is not sufficient and certainly not an alternative for fixing things and making them easy available in a backward compatible manner !
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