Comments on: Greg Linch on CoPress

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:03:22 +0000

I’ll drop in my 2 cents and echo what Daniel said about charging for support as opposed to charging for the software. For some time, I was confused about how open source companies could be profitable in any way (even if that wasn’t their main goal). I’m less confused about that now (although it’s still not entirely clear), but I definitely know that one of the main ways they generate profit is by providing support.

To my knowledge, this generally doesn’t generate much (if any) uproar from the people who contributed to the code base.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:18:53 +0000

@cody, sure, ideally that makes a lot of sense. Personally, though, I don’t think we hope to host hundreds of student news websites. Hosting is a low margin business, and there are too many players in the game to begin with. In short, we want thousands of schools in the network, but not necessarily on our hosting plan. If they on our plan, though, then we can provide interim support when they don’t have the tech talent to manage their own websites.

Thanks for the feedback, though. I definitely appreciate it.

By: Cody Brown

Cody Brown — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:41:17 +0000

Right, they think it’s kind of weak but they don’t have the resources to do much about it and as long as it doesn’t crash they really might not be searching for a replacement. CoPress comes along but how and why do they find you? How do you get the thousands of small colleges in the midwest to become aware of this and use it?

Yes, I know CoPress isn’t charging for the software – I brought that up because it would have been a means to raise enough money to create an ad-team and get these colleges on board in mass. If you don’t generate this flow, CoPress is at risk at becoming too niche if you don’t plan a way (perhaps you already are) to get in the face of these less savvy colleges for very little money. You won’t have much problem getting 20 or so sites, the challenge is how to get bigger from there.

Just my 2 cents.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:21:10 +0000

@cody, I'm pretty sure most people know that College Publisher is limiting, but I would argue that the papers that have moved off in the past are the ones that have had the resources to do so, which isn't necessarily everyone that has wanted to. Regarding charging for open source, I'm not entirely sure you understand what we want to do. Our plan is by no means to charge for the software, we're charging for the support. Furthermore (and this may be a message that hasn't been broadcast very well because different people on our team have different ideas to what the project is), making money off hosting isn't our primary goal. It's the first step to get student news onto platforms where they can collaborate.

By: Cody Brown

Cody Brown — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:26:58 +0000

The problem with Open Source is that you also can’t charge much of anything for it without an uproar from the people who contributed hours of their free time to code for you.

This is why it could be difficult to get in any situation where you would need to do a big ad campaign to get the impact you guys are looking for.

By: Cody Brown

Cody Brown — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:06:29 +0000

A fluid and constant development cycle is important but it’s also by no means exclusive to open source software. Facebook is a proprietary system in manic development cycle and would not be the same, or able to exist on its scale, if it was open source. Open source can be much more challenging to manage as you are dealing with people with various skill sets and various agendas.

College Publisher is a joke to anyone who knows anything about software, a lot of the most savvy papers got off the platform a long time ago. The problem for Co Press is that your market might not know or ever really be aware of why CP sucks so much ball. Word of mouth will help but getting a great deal of these less savvy papers to switch is going to be an incredible task that might cost a lot of money.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:02:56 +0000

Great video. Nice to hear more of the history and ideas behind CoPress.