ReactOS should seek corporate donations

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fusk
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2020 9:10 pm

ReactOS should seek corporate donations

Post by fusk »

Hi all,

I periodically hear news about how big corporations that rely on Windows 7 or even XP are quite upset and frustrated by the actions of Microsoft to terminate their support, even expensive paid support, due to Microsoft's unending quest to push everyone into using Windows 10, which many businesses do not want.

And I observe that the Never10 utility which lets people avoid a forced upgrade to Win10 has been downloaded over 3 million times: https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

If there is so much impetus for defying Microsoft, even from other businesses, does it not follow that there is an opportunity to boost the number and affluence of ReactOS supporters? If money is what is needed to bring it to a production level of quality, should not such corporate support be pursued?

I believe now would be a great time for the ReactOS project to seek donations especially from profitable companies that are seeking ways to reduce their dependence on Microsoft. These may number in the 1000s if not more.
Guntha
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jan 10, 2020 11:54 am

Re: ReactOS should seek corporate donations

Post by Guntha »

Hello,

I agree that ReactOS should focus on getting corporate or other large scale sources of funding, instead of individual donations as the main source of income. As of today, I see some obstacles to this:

1)ReactOS is not currently in a professionally usable state (by this I mean I can't see any professional paying before we get at least a complete modern web browser and a Microsoft Office suite compatible with ReactOS, and getting ReactOS itself to work on a reasonable range of real hardware). Even if we promise to meet these goals in some time frame, I'm not sure any company would invest in an OS that doesn't do the minimum of what they need. Even if they agree with ReactOS's mission.

2)Companies funding ReactOS would want, in exchange for their funding, be guaranteed that they get some features in return (be compatible with some software, run on some particular hardware...) which could shift the priorities from what the ReactOS team wants to achieve first, unless we get enough funding that we can hire additional staff to meet these demands in parallel.
Maybe it's possible to get some disinterested funding from companies who just believe in the mission, but I don't know how to do that. Remember I'm writing this post without being a business person at all :p

I've had an opportunity to discuss a bit with the maintainer of a now well-funded open source project, and he says that you shouldn't speak to companies using the word "donation", because you are somehow taken less seriously in negotiations. I believe, after we reach some revenue threshold, the "Donations" page should be replaced with a "licensing" page, making it clear that large companies should contact ReactOS first before planning to using it on a large scale, still with the possibility for donations for individual enthusiasts.

Another source of revenue could be state administrations, and I believe this is even more true now that more countries wish for more sovereignty in their use of technology (I'm saying this as an European; some countries, like Russia or China, can afford and are willing to develop their own technologies, and a GPL-licensed project wouldn't fit them anyway). See the tax on GAFAM revenue that some European countries are trying to create, or the fact that recently, Qwant replaced Google as the default search engine in the French administration.
Same problem as with private companies funding: they'll probably condition their funding to having some particular features.

There are also other ways of financing the project, like Mozilla's MOSS:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/moss/mission-partners/
PurpleGurl
Posts: 1790
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2009 5:11 am
Location: USA

Re: ReactOS should seek corporate donations

Post by PurpleGurl »

I agree. You don't really want to look like you have your hand out. Maybe something like a "premiere licensing" option. There needs to be some sort of incentive to make the corporate types want to give. So offering things like tech support, features they find important, or prestige might work. Of course, we can't really offer prestige yet since ROS isn't stable on a wide variety of hardware. We need to get past the common backhanded compliment of, "If you're trying to emulate Windows, you're doing quite a good job with the BSODs."

And therein lies the rub, we'd have to be more developed to the point of not needing help before many of the corporate types would be interested, but we are not there because we don't have the level of manpower needed to make that happen. If this were not an issue, then we wouldn't need help, thus a "catch-22."

That is one area where Wine has an advantage. It doesn't have to create a kernel and works well enough for what it does, thus Wine can have the Dreamweavers project for corporations that use Linux but only need Windows for 1-2 critical applications. So they are willing to support Dreamweavers to get more support and to get their bugs worked on, and any changes coming from that project filter back into Wine. However, that only helps us a little since our task is considerably larger.

Getting more colleges/universities interested might be of use, and that is already being done, some. That way, they can study ReactOS to learn Win32 internals, and professors can give assignments related to ReactOS. However, one caveat here would be if the students have seen inside the Windows Research Kernel. Such coders could never get to work on kernel code for us since that could taint their code.
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