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Harald Welte laforge at gnumonks.orgDear 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 at 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
--
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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