QSL Cards as a Way of Tracking Open-Source Software? 24
"It's always encouraging to receive a thank you for your work,
and that's what a QSL card would be, a personalized thank you and
memento from each downloader. It would be good for the community too:
if we are working for our egos, then QSL cards would be an
inexpensive way to boost a developer's ego. (Considering how
few of you are clicking on that PayPal button, perhaps you might be
motivated to buy a stack of QSL cards and to send them out)
It would be good for the economy: buying, printing, sending QSL
cards will help developers, printers, and the post office. And it can
be good for our projects: we might find that in addition to tee
shirts and coffee mugs, our development projects can sell a variety
of promotional QSL cards to developers to send to others.
So how do we turn this into the meme for 2002?"
Interesting idea. (Score:2, Insightful)
Majorcool / Majordomo (Score:2, Interesting)
ChiefArcher
Re:Majorcool / Majordomo (Score:1)
the snmp guys know about qsl cards (Score:2)
Postcardware (Score:1)
time. A quick search on google reveals around 8000
hits, it's even got an entry in the jargon file [tuxedo.org].
A friend of mine at university has quite a large collection of postcards people have sent him from around the world for various bits and pieces of code he wrote.
Digital QSL... (Score:2)
Heck if it gets popular enough, maybe it'll take off beyond simple "hello" recognition and we'll see these start showing up in sea-faring bottles, wedged in between the seats of long-distance busses, stuck into the crack in old brick walls down dark alleys. It would be fascinating to collect these.
Re:Digital QSL... (Score:2)
Step 1 (Score:3, Interesting)
The disturbing thing is that close to a third of the downloads for my KDE applications are from the default IE user. I wonder what all those people do when they get a source tarball instead of whatever it is they're expecting.
Re:Step 1 (Score:1)
Re:Step 1 (Score:1)
postcardware.. (Score:2)
Re:postcardware.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Long ago (bout '93 I guess) I was really into POVRAY (www.povray.org). I read the usenet group every day, spent loads of time rendering, helped set up websites, yadda yadda yadda. Then one day, Dan Farmer, one of the principle developers, thought it would be cool if he could show his wife that all those hours he spent on the computer was really doing something. He figured he'd ask all the folks who enjoyed using POVRAY for free to mail him a postcard. That way when the postman turned up with a big sack of mail, his wife would understand what this 'Internet' thing was all about.
Now, at this time POVRAY was pretty much the only 3D graphics app available for free to most people. It had a huge user base, it was a regular give-away on the coverdisks of PC mags. By anyone's reckoning it's still a major bit of free software.
Now, guess how many postcards he got...
I do believe the final total was around 10.
People who would spend hours staring at their screens while their 486z rendered stuff, or who would spend hours posting to usenet, could not be arsed to go and buy a postcard and a stamp and scribble an address on it.
That's just the way online stuff seems to be. Kind of sad, but true.
I bet if Slashdot posted an article saying "Let's show how much we like Linux - everyone go send Linus a card at this address" the total response would barely be much higher.
Re:postcardware.. (Score:2, Funny)
But I guess most of us would be wearing 'em then.
E-Mail QSL (Score:1)
Yeah, I've done something sort of similar (Score:2)
Watch your mailbox (Score:1)
Sure. Maybe as a reply to this ask slashdot! Better take your address off your webpage before you get inundated with mail. Just kidding
otoh (Score:1)
Redmond, WA
Dear Sirs:
Thanks for making this wonderful windows product; My job is tedious at best, but your Blue-Screen-Time-For-A-Smoke-Break feature helps the day to fly bye.
Keep up the good work!
...
This MIGHT work... (Score:1)