[osflash] OSFlash Roadmap: asking for your opinion

[Aral Balkan]

Hi Bob,

> I think a more important question is what does Aral plan to do with
> donations. While I think OSFlash is a useful service, it shouldn't
> cost all that much to run. The trac/svn hosting appears to be donated
> by cvsdude... I hope so anyway, it'd be a shame if Aral was paying for
> it himself.

The current costs are hosting for the site and wiki (which is being  
run well on the VPS plan that its on) and the cost of the CVSDude  
account. Neither of those will bankrupt me anytime soon!

The real costs, however are time. I want to develop OSFlash further  
but I have been held back because I've been working myself (outside  
of time I essentially donate to talking about Flash and open source  
at various conferences -- of which I'm doing 8 this year) doing  
consulting/training to pay the pesky rent!

So I've been thinking about how I can make it so that I can both  
develop on OSFlash *and* pay the rent and I believe I've come up with  
a solution. So here it is:

As of now, I am going to be devoting myself to developing an engine  
to power an open source web site similar to SourceForge but much  
simpler to use. It has automated project signups, etc., and the core  
functionality from the current solution. OSFlash will become one  
category (the Flash category) under the projects that are hosted  
there (alongside other Adobe and non-Adobe projects.) In order to  
make it possible for me to work on this and pay the rent, I am going  
to create a separate site that uses this engine which will host  
commercial projects for a fee. Finally, if companies want to use this  
engine, they'll be able to buy licenses for it and/or buy it as an  
appliance. This should make it financially feasible for me to work on  
OSFlash full time.

What does everyone think of this?

I want you to understand what this means in terms of the things I  
*won't* be doing to work on this: I won't have the time to put my  
training courses online as I wanted to and I won't be able to work on  
the mobile games that I had started working on as well as the couple  
of other web app projects I had in mind to work on. Also, it will  
mean that I have less time to contribute to certain betas, etc. Is  
this community worth it? Hell yes! :)

Again, before I commit to this, I want to hear your opinions as this  
is going to be something that I will be completely devoting myself to  
and I want to know whether or not I have your support in this before  
I do.

Aral