Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith)

A few weeks ago I received the following question: “I’d like to know more about how a distribution works. I suspect the answers differ across the spectrum, but how are they organized, why do they do what they do, what are the costs and how do they meet them? I guess I understand Red Hat, as a commercial venture, but what about community projects?” It’s been many years since I was involved in the developing of a distribution and so, to better answer the question, I reached out to the developers of several community projects. The first response came from Linux Mint developer and founder Clem Lefebvre. Today he shares with us the story of how Mint got started, what drives the developers, their challenges and how they pay for their infrastructure.

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Clement Lefebvre (Linux Mint) answers:
Clement Lefebvre I can’t say for other projects but I can try and explain Linux Mint a little. Whether it’s in a large company or a small structure, projects reflect the organization, the behaviour, the ideas and motivation of the key people who are empowered to lead them. In a small structure, projects can be totally independent and lead by a very small number of people, or sometimes even just one person. We’re all different and that makes each project and distribution unique in the way they are organized, their goals, and the way they achieve them. So with this said, how representative of a community project is Linux Mint? I don’t know.

Why do we do it?
What drives us is passion; passion for software, development and Linux. It starts when you’re not only using a technology but you feel the need to tinker with it. It goes beyond the technology and you’re quickly seduced by the social aspect, the collaboration of so many, the free gift you’re given, the idea of sharing and the political aspect of Free Software. You find yourself involved and like many others you feel like you’re part of something big and you want to contribute back to it. You help out existing projects to improve the Linux desktop and other users to migrate to it. This is the fun part and something a lot of people experience within the Linux community. You’re part of a community, the Linux community as a whole, made of millions of people, who together achieved something beautiful and decided to give it to the World. There’s no real need to describe this, because it’s all in here, in each and everyone of us. If you’re reading me on DistroWatch right now, and you’re taking the time to come here every week and follow this website, then you surely know what I mean. What you’re doing is getting involved in something you feel a passion for.

Now, the important aspect of this, is that many people feel this way. To lead a project successfully, you need passion, time, skills, motivation, feedback, recognition, resources and most importantly you need to know exactly what you want to achieve. You don’t wake up one morning thinking “I want to be successful, let’s start today”. I don’t think projects start like that, and I don’t even think companies start like that either. That process which leads to the creation of a project, is the same that drives so many people to contribute to our community. It starts with people, their passion, the time they invest and the skills they apply… give them some recognition and feedback and you’ll see their motivation double. If they have a vision they’ll achieve it and find ways to gather the resources they need and maximize the time they can spend. At the start of every project there’s one person’s vision and motivation which got lit by either early success, recognition or stubbornness.

In the case of Linux Mint it started with me. I discovered Slackware back in 1996 and I fell in love with it, with Linux and also at the time with Free Software (I’m not as radical as I used to be when it comes to Open Source and Free Software, but I was at the time). So like many others then, and many others now, I spent a lot time and passion in diverse activities related to Linux. I advocated and promoted Free Software, I helped people migrate to it, I wrote articles and tutorials, I spent a good part of my life on the IRC… and one day somebody came to me and offered to pay for my articles. I was getting good feedback from readers and with a little bit of extra money I had the recognition and resources needed to spend more time on this and to develop it more than just a hobby. That’s when you start working at night and spending less time with the family… there’s a fine line between a hobby and that thing you’re doing so often, and if it keeps your attention while at work and takes time away from your social life, you need some level of recognition and success from it to be able to go further. So, I was lucky and from there I decided I would try and publish my own articles. I named my website Linux Mint and I wrote even more. I wrote a lot of reviews and continued to tinker with Linux.. and then some day I decided to learn a little more about live CDs, packaging, repositories and how distributions were made. It gave me an opportunity to use my skills as a developer, which I really enjoyed, I was full of ideas for the Linux desktop and motivated to implement them, and as what I was doing got popular, it was only a matter of time before I wanted to dedicate all my time to it.

So that doesn’t explain why we do it, but you can see how it started, and you can see it started the same way it starts for people when they take the time and effort to contribute to Linux, and this is something many of you are doing on a daily basis.

Now, why do we continue to do it? Well… it’s the best thing in the World isn’t it? A vision, an implementation, feedback, improvement, success. You work at improving what you like best, and you get both a feeling of achievement and recognition from it. That would drive anybody so you can imagine how passionate we are, just as passionate as you when you give that time. We can see how Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS do, and we’re confident about ourselves. We can feel the joy we give to people with everything we do, and the joy they give back to us. We’re having fun messing with one of the most high-tech and open technologies there is, we invent new things, we’re supported by a huge community of people, we love our project as much as they do and we can take over the World without a rush. These are some of the reasons we do what we do, and you can feel these with any contribution you make to Linux, plus the feeling of being part to something bigger. As a distribution we’re at the center of this and we experience it on an even larger scale.

What are the costs and how do we meet them?
The biggest problem is to find time. That is the most costly resource in a project and the hardest to get. If you want to achieve what you want, at some stage you’re going to need to do it full time. To you that means leaving your job, to the project that means buying your time. And it only gets worse, because sooner or later you want to do more and you simply can’t do it by yourself anymore. That’s where we’re at, at the moment. Getting things done by volunteers is one thing, knowing you can reliably expect results is another. At some stage you need to get other people full-time into the project and that is the most costly resource. For them to leave their job and to join the project full-time you need to be able to guarantee you’ll be able to gather an income for them, and you’ll need to be sure it’s going to work for the project. It’s a complicated process to say the least, and unlike a company with an HR department, we’re a project made of developers who share a passion, that means no experience in management, recruitment or the sort of skills you need to efficiently gather what is needed the most here: time.

Other than this there’s a lot of costs but we’re meeting them comfortably. What costs money is the infrastructure needed to serve such as large user base. Our business model grows proportionally with the size of our user base. So, as the user base gets bigger, the costs raise, but so does the income. When the project starts and the user base is small, the costs are insignificant, and so is the income. As things get bigger, they both rise in proportion. Now we’re dealing with a network of dedicated servers, some of which are costly, and other IT related expenses (hardware, outsourcing, contracts..etc) but none of that matters as we’re able to either use our income to pay for all of this, or use the project itself to reduce the bill (for instance via partnerships or sponsorships).

The reason we’re successful is because we’re driven by what we do and focused on the product itself, so it’s extremely important we don’t deviate from it. For this reason our business model comes almost entirely from the product’s success and the Linux Mint community of users. Our most precious asset is our community, our most needed resource is time. Rather than engaging in activities we’re not interested or specialized in, such as merchandising, support, and other areas that distributions and companies usually use within their own business model, we chose to focus solely on development and to raise the income entirely from the product. To achieve this we rely on one of the most passionate communities there is, a community which supports us every single day, with donations, sponsorships, and most importantly with time given to us. We’re getting a lot of help from our community, whether it’s support, artwork, promotion, development… at least half of the work that goes in each release comes from the community, it’s like doubling the manpower and getting more done for free. You can look at the income generated by donations, sponsorships and you get an idea with a figure on it. Add to this the income we generate from people’s activity and interaction with advertising, and above all, add all the time they’re giving to the project which translates into more work done and less time for us to find.

In the end of the day, money is only a metric to measure time and power and it doesn’t measure it all. Sometimes we spend money on things we can get for free, because the time we don’t spend in getting them is more valuable than the money itself. So how do we do? We can tackle any problem and pay for what we need. We can engage in expensive projects (we recently decided to mirror Debian for instance and we’re now confident enough in our new servers to have all LMDE users point to them). We’re almost ready to scale up, to hire, to rent offices, the financial aspect of this isn’t the main issue anymore. Our biggest problem is to buy time. Because unlike everything else in the project that’s been getting better and better since the start, finding the time to achieve what we have in mind has become harder and harder. Do you achieve twice as much when you’ve got twice as many developers? What are big companies and their large IT staff doing wrong to let small projects like ours challenge them? How do we manage to become more productive and to take on bigger projects? We don’t need to worry about the money, the community removes that problem for us and allows us to focus on what really matters, finding the time that we need. This is the real challenge.

Source:Distrowatch By Jesse Smith