[FM Discuss] thoughts for the plan

[adam hyde]

hey all,

I am coming to the end of the financial sustainability plan planning. Its been
interesting and I have some interesting possbilities for creating income
which is not just funding oriented. Actually, I have tried to avoid
funding and build a not-for-profit plan that generates income to keep
the FM foundation, website etc going while also building in
possibilities for writers/maintainers to generate income.

I have 2 weeks to go to finish the plan and I will throw some ideas onto
the list these next days for feedback. If you can throw back a one or
two line comment on the ideas as they come I would greatly appreciate
it.

ok...so there is one idea I am writing up at the moment. This is to
include advertising in manuals. I was originally quite wary of this and
I wrote to a list which many not-for-profit foundations on it to ask
their opinion. Ton Roosendaal replied with some great advice (he is the
lead dev on blender as I understand it). They make money from selling
manuals and selling advertisements in the back of manuals. His opinion
is that if you place advertisements in the back of a manual which add
value for the reader they will welcome them. It could be, for example,
interesting to include an advertisement for a conference relevant to the
software in the manual.

This seems to me to be quite a palatable idea. As I am very wary of
'tainting' the manuals with advertising. However some pages at the back
of the manual focusing on this kind of 'added-value' advertising seems
to me to be ok.

Following on from this I was thinking that perhaps the maintainer of the
manual could use this as a mechanism to generate revenue so they can do
their job (maintaining). A maintainer then could keep that revenue, or
use it to pay some of the main contributers, or donate it to the
software developer, whatever they want.

This could be useful for artists wanting another revenue source (which
is a good example for this list as there are many people like this
contributing to FM), or it could even be that the software developer
themselves could generate the manual and use it to fund their own
existence or the development of the software. 

Software developer X, for example, might wish to maintain a manual and
then place advertisements in the back of the manual which helps them
survive financially so they can work on the software. 

If FM itself also needed some income then we would reserve a few pages
to sell advertising too in any of the manuals.

...thoughts?...


adma






adam hyde
floss manuals

free manuals for free software
http://www.flossmanuals.net

mobile : + 31 6 154 22770 (Netherlands mobile)
email : adam at flossmanuals.net