[clug] RE: Open Source promo stall

[Darren Freeman]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 12:36, Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au wrote:
> > and also demonstrating the software - people will be more likely to boot
> > off a CD they saw working.. if we get a freebie demo computer for the
> > day it will likely have XP on it - so that proves that Knoppix doesn't
> > hurt XP.
> 
> That's an idea. Have a bootable distro that sets itself up as a
> CD burning kiosk. Insert blank CD. Click on product you want.
> Wait for chosen product to pop out. That could be almost self service
> with a honesty jars for donations to whatever charity they agree with.

I don't see how that works. Do you mean the bootable kiosk contains the
products to be burned? I thought the single-CD bootable distro *was* the
product to be burned. And I wouldn't be surprised if Knoppix could burn
itself without needing a hard disc for storage ;) As long as there's two
drives.

The honesty jars - how do people specify where the money goes? Wouldn't
it be easier to just make the honesty jars pay for the CDs, and lunch
for the volunteers, and any excess goes to
EFA/FSF/the_next_stall_we_run?

> > >  - Moderate demand. Will we need to be prepared for hundreds of people
> > >    grabbing CDs only because they are free? Will we be able to burn CDs
> > >    that fast? Maybe charge a modest sum (say $2 per CD)and donate it to
> > >    a charity on behalf of us, the fair and whoever donates the blank CDs.
> > >    That should avoid the "gimmee" crowd and also get a little publicity.
> 
> > The price could be lower than that, really, and a donation of CDs is no
> > longer necessary in that case. If you charge more than the CD costs you
> > can be self-sustaining and still pay for the volunteers to have pizza
> > for lunch!
> 
> I was actually thinking about the limit on how fast we can burn CDs. If it's

Yeah but $1 will stop people grabbing CDs if they don't need to. Plus it
will limit one per customer as people will just burn their own at home. 

> absolutely free, I wouldn't be suprised if we were unable to keep up with
> people grabbing CDs purely because they are free. Anyone genuinely interested
> won't mind $2 especially if it is going to something like freedom from hunger.

In keeping with the theme though I think the FSF/EFA should be the ones
to get the cash, people are supporting free software by getting the CDs,
so the developers of the software should get the excess. Although
charging $2 for the CDs and giving it to the FSF/EFA, whilst *also*
having a donation jar to something more basic like feeding the hungry
could be an idea. But the jar is a separate issue, not related to the
software side of things in that case.

> Antti

I do like your idea of a free software kiosk though. Have a computer
with every possible free software distribution (that isn't totally out
of date), and code some kiosk software. You could even mod the case to
include an arcade machine coin chute and design a self-feeding slot-load
burner that simply spits out one disc per gold coin donation ;) But
that's going too far...

However creating a distro distro sounds cool ;) Maybe it connects to a
central site with every distro and caches the most recent burns. So even
a laptop plugged into a school network becomes a distro kiosk, off a
boot CD. You can cache ISOs on the existing FAT32 partition and leave
Winblowz intact. For as long as people stick to the cached ISOs the
kiosk doesn't generate bandwidth. The distro can ask the server what
distros to cache in advance, such as the latest of the Mandrake, Debian,
RedHat, SuSE, Slackware, etc... in order of popularity as determined by
the burn counter on the server. The kiosk operators then organise into
teams to generate the most giveaway CDs and donate the most proceeds to
the FSF and each distro based on burn count.

What a visionary dream... Also I think it should dispense coffee for the
person while they wait ;)

Have fun,
Darren

Have fun,
Darren