Section 9.3. Freemacs and Business


9.3. Freemacs and Business

Freemacs was a hobby, and I had no intention to turn it into a business. My computers (even my home computers) were paid for by my employer, so I had no expenses to cover. As the program gained users, they told other MS-DOS users about it. Those users wanted updates, and none were available on any of the worldwide networks of the day. Having no other recourse, they asked me for copies. I knew that they were gaining from these copies, so I asked for a portion of those benefits in the form of a copying fee. Between 1985 and 1991, most of the activity of Crynwr Software consisted of putting software on floppy disks and mailing it to customers.

Staying in Touch

It's crucially important to stay in touch with your users. The biggest advantage an open source developer has is close contact with users. If you're the primary user for the software, of course you know what users wantyou just sit and cogitate. Quite a bit of open source software is written to "scratch your own itch."

This is easy and rewarding because very little communication is needed. Programmers are not typically great communicators (most programmers fall into one of the four NT classes on the standard Myers-Briggs personality test). A programmer who can listen and talk is worth her weight in chips (and chips are worth more per ounce than gold).

With Freemacs, I started with a single mailing list, which proved to be a mistake: some people don't need any help and just want to know when new releases come out; other people want to get or give help but don't want to code; and still other people are interested in every miniscule detail of the program. One list cannot serve everyone. I found that I needed three lists.

One list carried only announcements of new releases. You really want to have an announcements list, and you need to remember to use it. You might send only one or two pieces of email a year, but those are crucial. First, you need to remind people that they've given permission for you to send them email. Second, people need to know that you're in business even if they don't currently need your business. Any user might suddenly find himself needing to become a customer. You need to be the proprietor of the relationship between the software and the user, as you'll use that relationship to make money.

A second list was for user-level help. Some programs are exceptionally powerful (I'm not thinking of the Unix "cat" or "tail" here, but something more like sendmail or qmail) and in-depth knowledge to properly exploit all that power. Some users want to acquire that depth. Others do not, but will dip their toes into the depths by asking a question on the user mailing list. If there are sufficient users of the program, you will have other businesses competing with you. One of the ways they will compete is by offering to help other people. No need to worry, though! By virtue of your proprietary interest in the program, you will have a built-in advantage over these other businesses. In any case, customers like competition because they perceive it as ensuring fair prices.

The third list is for developers. I am of two minds here. You could have the developers list open to all comers, regardless of their to contribute to the project. Or you could have the developers list be open only to those who actually have contributed. The main tradeoff is protecting the time and attention of your contributors. You don't want them signing off the developer mailing list because it has too many user-level questions being asked on it. You really need their attention to help you make decisions that will affect them. For example, if you change an API, you need to clear that change with your developersfirst, because it keeps them involved in the process, and second, because they may be relying on something you're doing.


Two interesting stories about mailing floppies: one is about a customer in Ireland who had two floppies go bad on him. Guessing that his email was going through some kind of antiterrorist scanner (as the Irish Republican Army was quite active at the time), I sent him a third floppy wrapped in 1mm-thick lead foil. That floppy got through OK. Another is of a customer who, although a part of the defense department, had no Internet access, or even have a modemand this was after almost everybody had gotten on the Internet, so I was surprised that they were even allowed to telephone out, but I sent them a floppy with software on it and they were happy with that.

FreeDOS has adopted Freemacs as its standard text editor, so it still has a user base. I only rarely do any MS-DOS work, and when I do, I'm happy with the state of Freemacs, so it's now frozen in time. There were never any commercial users, so apart from selling copies on floppies, Freemacs managed only to buy me my own computer for home.



Open Sources 2.0
Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
ISBN: 0596008023
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 217

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