Request to be listed in your Software Vendors Link page

[Murray Stokely]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 10:08:45AM +0000, Ceri Davies wrote:
> The current situation with cheap CD vendors is suboptimal to say the
> least.  We now have both alllinuxcd.com and cheeplinux.com waiting for a
> response on outstanding requests, and none of the people who look after
> this page want to touch it because of the response they get from within
> the project when/if they add a vendor such as this.

I'm not a disinterested party, as I have been involved with Walnut
Creek CDROM and FreeBSD Mall, Inc. for over 8 years now.  However,
I've stated my feelings many times.  I like our old policy.  We never
used to list this kind of company before and I see no reason to now.

We should only list CDROM vendors that do one of the following things
:

1) Contribute money to the FreeBSD Foundation (pledges to do so are
   irrelevant, real contributions after they have already been made
   should only be counted.  A pledged percentage of profit is
   especially irrelevant, since most such businesses are break even
   with little or no profit after salaries)

2) Employ committers to work on specific or general FreeBSD projects.

3) Make substantial advocacy contributions to FreeBSD (a Linux company
   that sells FreeBSD as an afterthought is not likely to do this).

4) Serve a geographical region that is not well-served by existing
   CDROM vendors.

I don't recall seeing any requests from vendors where there was a
doubt in my mind about if this was a grey area.  All requests seem to
be from one well defined class of vendor :

1) Vendors that employ committers directly, make hardware and monetary
   donations to other committers, spend money on FreeBSD promotion and
   advocacy, etc.

2) Vendors that make substantial advocacy contributions.

3) Vendors started by a small group of people in a country that they
   feel is not well served by existing larger North American FreeBSD
   distributors.  Usually these come and go over time, but if there is
   a niche they are filling we should list them.

4) Vendors that sell CDs for about $2 each, take a dime of profit for
   themselves, and are detrimental to the project by stealing sales
   from vendors of the first 3 categories.

	- Murray