Dear Akib, Choukoumoun and others,

as this question has been raised several times in recent days, please let me deviate from the usual policy of strictly separating the Osmocom open source projects and the commercial activities of sysmocom:

At sysmocom, we are selling a "3.5G starter kit limited edition" consisting of a small embedded PC with the Osmocom sofwtware and a nano3G S8. It's all pre-installed and pre-configured, together with 10 SIM cards.

If you ware interested in buying the nan3G S8 itself without the starter kit, this can also be arranged. In any case, please contact sales@sysmocom.de with related inquiries, and keep this list about technical discussion about the Osmocom cellular network infrastructure projects.

The revenue generated from selling this "sysmoNITB 3.5G starter kit limited edition" is helping us to recover at least a part of the many, many man-months of R&D that sysmocom invested upfront in developing osmo-iuh, libiu and the 3.5G support in OsmoMSC, OsmoSGSN and OsmoHLR. Yes, some parts were funded by a grant from NLnet and parts by a customer, but to a very large extent, it was sysmocom's hard-earned money that was spent in paying salaries for related R&D.

So if you want to show you respect and support for us putting paid engineers like Neels, Philipp, Pau, Max, etc. on developing things like 3.5G support, buying related products through sysmocom is definitely the way to go. Helping us to recover that investment also enables us to invest more in deevloping more/new features. We'd love to work on a LTE MME, for example - but we can only pay our developers in those areas where there is some revenue/fundinng.

If you instead go and buy a nano3G from e-bay or from some other source, you are not contributing to the funding of related developments. This is of course legally perfectly ok. That's what you can do with Free Software. However, I would encourage you to think about the bigger picture. If everyone bought a nano3G off ebay, we wouldn't be able to make the investment in developing the Iu/3G related Osmocom code in the first place.

So a polite reminder to everyone: FOSS lives from contribution. If you use Osmocom software, please make sure you contribute in some way, whether by sharing the development work and contributing by code, patches, documentation - or by buying hardware or appliances from/via sysmocom. I assure you, funds are spent on R&D, and not for fancy cars (we have zero company cars), fancy offices, or the like.

Best Regards, Harald