On a free repacker

[mjt@nysv.org]

Hi

There was an IRC discussion earlier today, a short one, about the repacker.

It appears that Reiser4 does not fragment much in normal use, but it can
get badly fragmented with fsstress for example?

Now, the idea is to sell the repacker.

Basically:

1) It could be binary-only
   Enough buyers will open the source like with Blender
   There would be online statistics which describe how much to go
   before this happens.
  
2) You could sell the sources and the rights to do whatever you want,
   except redistribute it.

There was the point that Blender had gained some popularity before
the source release, which Reiser4 does not yet have. That may make
this difficult to push through. A free repacker would make the situation
better, but I see it as one of those annoying chicken-and-egg problems.

The pricing must be ok too. Not so high that regular people won't buy it
but not so cheap that it doesn't generate revenue.

If the source code is sold, people may want to develop it further, but
I'm sure if they pay 1000000000e for it, they will expect perfection
and not contribute.

Then there's some copy-protection issues. I hope it will not be too
heavily laid with license keys and stuff like that, because it makes
usage harder and doesn't stop anyone from being an asshole.

I understood that a binary-only model would be in the form of a kernel
module? It may be the easiest method.

Hans, what's your take on this?
Maybe a real donations page would be required to get the baby up and
running, maybe some really basic repacker but one that's so rock-solid
that people would buy it and know they'll get free updates and in
the end it'll be all open...

Just my two cents worth of rambling again :)

-- 
mjt