Linuxcnc pro/paid?

TroyO said:
Or maybe a "bid for answer" kind of set up, LOL. $5 if you answer this question for me within 24Hrs (Or configure this INI or....) and if you want it RIGHT NOW you better cough up $20, and the first one to answer it gets the dough? (Or, opts to donate it back to LinuxCNC?)
end quote

Well that would certainly make things more interesting as most of us here are way more challenge driven than money driven, so the donate back to Linuxcnc is a very nice idea that would help developers devote more time knowing that it would help pay the bills. The reality of things is, most of us here don't give a rats beehind for money, but we do need money to live, so if the love for developing could also help living it would most certainly give a much needed peace of mind.
There is the ugly reality that money destroys everything, but i am confident that Big John, and other developers and moderators will find a way not to let money interfere with what is being done here.
My personal opinion is : the first time i gave it a spin it took me 10 minutes flat to have the machine drawing the "Axis" logo with a marker and the joy of it will last for a life time ( it took me 20 minutes to figure how to teach a Kuka KR150 robot so maybe i am prone to figuring out things ), and since then i have lived and learned with Lcnc every day. I am absolutely amazed at how easy it is to configure it to any task and to any hardware that i have or use or build myself, it is capable of pushing the parallel port to the extremes ( think 1 computer 3 parports and a loooooot of hardware ), and with the added mesa cards that can be multiplied exponentially.
In short, THANK YOU to all who made Lcnc possible and continue improving it.
With utmost respect,
Tom

TroyO wrote: I'm not sure of licensing terms or whatever, but I don't see why someone couldn't set themselves up as a LinuxCNC consultant and provide whatever level of service a consumer wanted? Hmm, maybe there could be a "LinuxCNC Certified Engineer" certification process or something where folks are vetted to some certain level of competency?

Or maybe a "bid for answer" kind of set up, LOL. $5 if you answer this question for me within 24Hrs (Or configure this INI or....) and if you want it RIGHT NOW you better cough up $20, and the first one to answer it gets the dough? (Or, opts to donate it back to LinuxCNC?)

I'm just a hobbyist but I can certainly think of times I would have coughed up some dough. (Although really I have found the forum to be pretty awesome!)

I guess it depends on the goal and the person/people providing the service.
If I had more time and knew a little more about linuxcnc or even just had the time to devote to learning it I would totally try to give this a go. For me though it would have to be worth my time. The way I see it is $5 here or $20 there isn't worth making yourself available all the time. I think the way to go would be a monthly subscription. Say like $4/mo for private use with limited support, $10/mo basic commercial support and say $25/mo for high priority commercial support.

now you get 10 of each membership and now you could reasonably devote 15 hours a month to linuxcnc be it support or development. As your client base grew you could devote more time to it until you could expand and add more people to be available around the clock.
I would happily pay $10/mo just for linuxcnc development but I am one of those people who with a paid membership does want a higher tier of support.

tommylight wrote: There is the ugly reality that money destroys everything, but i am confident that Big John, and other developers and moderators will find a way not to let money interfere with what is being done here.

I completely disagree with this.
I really wish we lived in a society that didn't revolve around money. I wish I had all the time in the world to play with linuxcnc and make parts for my customers for free. sadly that is not the world we live in. I am all about trying to promote moving towards that world but in the meantime I am all about making as much money as I can because you can't do $#!! without it. I wish we could all work together. I often wonder what a better world it could be if bill Gates, Steve Jobs and linus torvalds had all worked together to develop technology and awesome operating systems instead of Apple and Microsoft spending most their time fighting and suing each other and both making every effort to limit the capabilities of Linux. It's a great ideal and I think we should all try to work towards that ideal but in this current society money can accelerate development and improvement. it can help make things better faster. It's silly to ignore that things could be even better if they were different.

now you get 10 of each membership and now you could reasonably devote 15 hours a month

The first problem here is that I don't think anyone is going to pay you for "priority" so you can be available for 15 hours a month.

The next problem is that the user base is not large enough to support this type of service. To make a real paid service you would have to be available for 40-70 hours a week 52 weeks a year. There are only 7272 total registered users on the forum. I am guessing that 5% at most would want to continually pay for priority service so that means 370 people might pay for priority service.

The next problem is that the person(s) providing priority service must be very, no extremely, knowledgeable about LinuxCNC. Nobody wants to pay for tech support and not actually get the support you paid for because the tech does not know about the question being asked.

The next problem is that the LinuxCNC user base is world wide. So now out of those 370 people half will be awake while the tech support is open and the other half will be sleeping. So now you only have 185 people that will pay for a 1 person 1 time zone "priority" service system.

If you were to get 370 people to pay for service, and you had 5 extremely knowledgeable persons on a rotating scheduled to be available 24-7. You would have to charge $70.00 a month per subscription to provide the service assuming a 60K a year salary including benefits for the workers. This does not even cover any additional company expenses. (all numbers are just for an example calc to show the basics of trying to make this an actual business)

Ultimately I think it would be a very difficult to impossible sell to sell "Pro" service without actually having a "Pro" service to sell. Especially when you have a large base of extremely knowledgeable people on this forum and mailing list that are willing to help for FREE at a slightly delayed response to what you would get with a "Pro" service.

I understand for mainstream businesses that use LinuxCNC it would be good to have some sort of priority support but just my first glance at this shows that the market for this business is not great enough to support the business at this time.

"For me though it would have to be worth my time. The way I see it is $5 here or $20 there isn't worth making yourself available all the time. "

I was actually thinking the exact opposite. It wouldn't be one person, but rather an open ended pool of people, and the 5 and 20 were just for-instance.

An example:

I could use help setting up automatic tool length probing. I have the probe, it is hooked to pin 12. Can someone take a copy of my relevant files and add the parts needed, in 72 hours? I am willing to pay $30.

Of the 20 or however many people in the pool, Joe Blow is the first to come back with "Hey, I have some time, and I could use that $30. I'll do it." Or.... No one goes for it. So, 24 hours later I up my bid and say "ok, now it's 48 hours, and I will go to $60". And so on.

At some point the money involved (or donation to LCNC) balances out and folks will be able to gauge if it's a $5 or $60 issue. That way no "one" is on the hook all the time, and when/if you need it you could pull in some $ on "free time" if you wanted and ignore it if you didn't.

Anyway, it's certainly not a fully developed idea, just a notion. It probably has holes ones would drive a LCNC controlled truck through....

I was actually thinking the exact opposite. It wouldn't be one person, but rather an open ended pool of people, and the 5 and 20 were just for-instance.

An example:

I could use help setting up automatic tool length probing. I have the probe, it is hooked to pin 12. Can someone take a copy of my relevant files and add the parts needed, in 72 hours? I am willing to pay $30.

Of the 20 or however many people in the pool, Joe Blow is the first to come back with "Hey, I have some time, and I could use that $30. I'll do it." Or.... No one goes for it. So, 24 hours later I up my bid and say "ok, now it's 48 hours, and I will go to $60". And so on.

At some point the money involved (or donation to LCNC) balances out and folks will be able to gauge if it's a $5 or $60 issue. That way no "one" is on the hook all the time, and when/if you need it you could pull in some $ on "free time" if you wanted and ignore it if you didn't.

I think this would be the best way to do it at the current time. Maybe we could get the mods to make a new category for paid jobs. It could be in the user exchange category.