On Wed 12 Nov 2003 (11:14 +0100), Achim Mueller wrote:
* Christopher D. Yep wrote on 11 Nov 2003:
There are probably a substantial number of backgammon players who
have never heard of gnubg or who are intimidated of
downloading/installing files over the Internet. Has anyone
thought of producing gnubg CDs (a full installation + manual) to
give (actually sell at $1-2 each, i.e. cost only, no profit) to
backgammon distributors around the world (e.g. Gammon Press, Carol
Joy Cole, Backgammon Shop, etc.)? Would this be useful?
We already talked about this at Nordic Open this year. Ken Arnold
was distributing gnubg on ca. 7000 Gamesgrid CDs.
If gnubg will be distributed on cd there are a few questions:
- What about the money, where do we open an account?
- Who will organize burning the cds, printing the cover, label, etc?
- What else do we put on the cd (i.e. bigger databases)? - Finally:
Will there be a demand on the cds in times of adsl?
Given the rate of changes being made (and, to be honest, bugfixes as
well), there's a lot to be said for not making large numbers of CDs.
Putting up an ISO of a CD, with the various versions for Windows, Unix
tarball, MAC-OS version, databases and installers might be nice, the
anyone who wants to download an ISO and put it on a CD can do so. For
those who might want to distribute gnubg, CD-burners are ubiquitous
these days and CDRs are so cheap that it doesn't make sense to produce
CDs in advance of actual demand (and it prevents ending up with a pile
of CDs with an annoying bug in the version or lacking some new nifty
feature).
If traffic is an issue, I can provide space on ftp.demon.nl for a copy
of the downloads, including room for a some ISOs - say 10Gb or so. I
can also arrange mirroring. So if there's an issue with traffic levels
from www.gnubg.org (or if Nardy has one for his skynet account, or
Oystein with his), then setting this up and putting links on the
various sites to ftp.demon.nl's copy might be a real savings.