There is no such thing as a free lunch
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Feldman, Steven (KnowWhere)
There is no such thing as a free lunch On being an open source citizen Have you ever wondered? - Why do people write software for nothing? - How do those volunteers earn a living? - How do those companies pay wages? - How much did it cost to put this event on? - Is there really such as thing as a free beer let alone free software? - Is there any obligation on me as a user of open source software to contribute? - How can I contribute to open source if I am not a developer? This talk will explore the open source business model and the motivations of individuals, organisations and businesses that contribute to open source projects. It will hopefully prompt a discussion on what might be reasonably expected of users of open source software.
 Okay, while we are setting up the shop again, I want to introduce to you Stephen Felton. I met him for the first time earlier this year for a rather English tea somewhere in the middle of London and he is one of the few people who I think have really shown that you can be an open source evangelist and a business savvy person while remaining a nice and approachable person. Quite often it's said that open source and business don't go well together. Well here's a living proof. Okay, thank you. May the first be with you. So it bugs me when people say that open source isn't free because you have to pay for support and services. It bugs me when people complain about bugs in the open source software but don't do anything about it. So this is an involving thought process. I want you to start to think about why people should be paying for free software. As it's an involving thought process, I call it a beta version. So right up front, let me make some confessions to you. I'm an evangelist. I'm a business person, as Mark said. I'm not a code writer. This talk is about evangelism for business within an open source community. So just bear that in mind. Have you ever wondered what makes free, how does free software work? I mean, is it something that you think about? What I want to do is I want to talk to the community today. Usually this talk is addressed primarily to users of open source software. But this is a community of people who make the software, who develop the software. And what I want to do is give you a few thoughts about how you can evangelize to users and to potential users the reason that they should engage with professional open source businesses and how they can move from just being users of free software to contributors to open source software. And I think sometimes in this community, we're suspicious of businesses within open source gear. I think there's a very different attitude within our sister community at Location Tech. And I think in this regard, probably in many other regards as well, we can learn from them as I'm sure they can learn from us. So a couple of questions for you to wake you up because you've been sitting there for a while. Who here works for a company that's sponsored them to come? Company or an organization that's sponsored them to come here? Okay. Who's an individual who's come under their own buck? Okay. Just looking around the room, that tells you something. How many of you work in academia or the public sector? So quite a lot of people working in academia and public center sponsored to come here. Okay. And now how many of you develop or consult with open source geo software? So that's quite a lot of you. Okay. So we're on the right track here. And finally, out of those people, how many actually contribute code? Right. Okay. So this is a code writing audience of people mainly from a geo business background working paid for to be here. So have you ever clicked the donate button? Now this is a question that I would ask to users very frequently and it's a question that you should be asking to users. Do you click the button often, occasionally or never? I gave this talk a while ago and one person put their hand up and said that they clicked on the donate button. I mean, I use QGIS for fun and I donate to the QGIS project because it's such a cool project. And if people write software, somebody needs to find a way to help them to keep on doing it. So what I'm going to talk about here is a little bit about the Phosphor G community. Why I think business is important to the Phosphor G community. How the business models work and many of you may know this and what it means for you and your organization when you're talking to your customers, how you might use this information. So I'm going to start by quoting Paul Ramsey. Quoting Paul Ramsey seems to be part of what goes on at Phosphor G. Paul Ramsey three years ago explained what Phosphor G is and why it works. He said, in FOS you get what you pay for. Everyone gets what you pay for. You get what everyone pays for. Now that's a beautiful summary of Phosphor G that you can use when you're talking to potential clients. There's a key word in each three lines of it, pay. It's not free and that's a message that I think we need to work on. It doesn't mean you can't use it freely but it does mean that somebody has to pay for it. If you've got half an hour, find the slides afterwards, follow the link that I put there, listening to Paul's talk is one of the best half an hours that you can spend in terms of getting away of articulating the message of Phosphor G. So who is this community that we're talking about? Well, it's thousands of people at this event as we've seen at all our other events. But it's also 39 projects, 50 chapters, 10,000 people signed up to over 200 mailing lists, a website that's in 15 languages, 245 businesses registered as solution developers and providers and something like 7,200 people employed in those companies, not of all of whom work on Phosphor G. This is not a small community, it's a big community. I wanted to work out how big this community was. I wanted to get some numbers. Why did I do this? People were asking me why are you doing this survey, Stephen? And the reason I'm doing the survey is when you're sitting in front of a potential client and maybe the opposition is a very, very large proprietary software company with a billion dollars of revenue and X thousand employees, being able to talk about your community and present it as a cohesive whole, even though it's distributed, gives you a very powerful tool in defending against the fud that's fear, uncertainty and doubt that your competitors may well try and use to win business against you. So let me give you... So I conducted this survey, I have to qualify and say I have a moderate number of responses to the survey. I've used some fairly crude stats to scale it up to give me an estimate of the overall OSGO economy. It's very rough numbers. If more organizations who are here contributed to the survey, which would take you five minutes, we'd get more accurate numbers that I could share with everybody. So there are 120 to 150 active companies developing consulting with OSGO software. There are somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 employees engaged in this activity. There's somewhere between 150 and $200 million worth of revenue associated with this activity. These are quite big numbers. This is a good-sized software business we're talking about. We may be here, I'm a one-man business, somebody else is a 10-man business, boundless is maybe a 100-man business, the biggest. But overall, this is a pretty big organization. So those numbers are worth bearing in mind and they're useful, I believe. Now if you want to contribute, the URL is somewhat easy to remember, Bitly Phosphogy Survey, I'll put the slides up available afterwards so you can go and find it. It would take you two minutes to contribute to the survey. So why is it going on about this? I just want to write code is what you're thinking, but you're staying here, which is kind of you, thank you. So I'm going to quote myself and there was a long debate about something on a mailing list. There was far too much time on OSG and mailing lists and it was about business and stuff like that. So I said, I believe that the long-term sustainability of Phosphogy is at least in part dependent on successful businesses that employ developers, consultants, and support the community in its events. I'd go further. A healthy business community based on Phosphogy is the evidence that we're developing the right products that people need and want to use and it is how we build the community for everybody. So now I've got a dispeller myth and I've got to say thank you to Andrea who she knows that I quote her on this. She wrote, some say that the participants in Phosph communities are in fact compensated for their labor, not with money but with social capital. The not compensated part with money is misleading. We know now that probably 80% of code is contributed by people who are employed by companies to contribute code. That is a great thing. It doesn't mean that there isn't a place for volunteers in our community but it does mean that we need to recognize where most of the code is coming from, a lot of the support is coming from, and we should embrace that. So even though code is contributed by people who are paid for it, some does come from volunteers and one thing we should remember is even the volunteers need pizza. You don't get code sprints with volunteers coming to code sprints without providing accommodation, without providing catering, without providing facilities. The budget for the code sprints I'll come to but it wasn't trivial the amount of money that goes to putting on the code sprints here. So bear that in mind. And then we come to support, which is the backbone of a lot of businesses in open source. And people say you can get support via the mailing list or you can get it on Stack Exchange. Well, I want to say this and excuse me for swearing, but what the fuck are you thinking about customer? If you think you can post on a mailing list at 10 o'clock at night and get support ready for the following morning because your solution is broken. If this is business critical software, then it needs business critical support. And if you were buying it from a proprietary vendor, you would pay the equivalent of the initial purchase cost over the first four years in support. So there is no reason at all why people should not be paying for support. And I think we have a culture which sometimes is reluctant to say you need to pay for that. And it's something that we shouldn't rely on the goodwill of volunteers to solve customers problems. So this talk was entitled, There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. So I thought I'd let you know how much a free lunch costs. It costs around 700 euros a person. I know I said 640. It's closer to 700 euros a person to run a conference here in this fantastic venue. Before somebody says, well, we don't need to be in this fantastic venue, you're absolutely right. We don't. It's very nice, but we don't need to be here. But go find a venue that can support 850 or 1,000 people and you'll find that they all charge quite a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to run this venue. The average delegate income of paying delegates at this event is 595 euros. You don't have to be an accountant to see there's a gap. That's before the students come. That's before the bursaries. That's before the various other passes that we give to people and we want to give more passes to more people. And the way we make it work is with sponsorship. Sponsorship this year at Phosphor G is working out at 160 euros a person. That's impressive. Thank you to the sponsors. But it's understanding how this whole thing hangs together. The code sprint was funded by OOSDO and Phosgis. The total bill for the code sprint is over $10,000. This is not cheap. Someone has to pay for open source software or for free software. It's not really free. That's why I say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Quick summary of what pays the bills. You'll know this. What pays the bills is sponsored features, implementation services, etc. You know this. So here are a few thoughts, first of all, for individuals who use Phosphor G. There are two ways you can be an open source citizen. You can contribute your time. You can contribute your money. It's as simple as that. If you're an organization, it's a little bit more complex. And what we need, the large organizations that use our software to do, in my opinion, is to cross the chasm from being a user organization to being a contributing organization. To becoming a contributor. What do I mean by being a contributing organization? Well, fundamentally, quoting Paul Ramsey again, using is not the same as supporting. And also, organization supports open source with time and money. So we're back to time and money for organizations. And here is my five point plan. Take it away with pleasure. Use it, adapt it. Because I think some of this is how we engage with the user community to make them become the supporting contributing community. It's a five point plan. First point, how much should you be contributing? This is a really important question. When you're talking to an organization, how much should they be contributing? And the answer is, it's up to you. But work out your savings. Work out how much you save by using free and open source software. Be very, very conservative on that calculation. And then maybe contribute 5% of your savings, 10% of your savings. Any amount of, any calculation that you do that is based on savings and takes a tiny proportion of those savings starts that organization on a journey to becoming a contributor. You can contribute hard cash. You can donate to projects, sponsor features, sponsor the foundation, sponsor an event. You can contribute time. And an important point to bear in mind for those of us who don't write code is that there is, you can be a contributor to this community without writing code. We need documentation. We need testing. We need feedback. We probably need some UI skills and research. And we certainly need translation. So there are lots of things that you can contribute that don't involve code. And these are things that organizations that use the software may well have a really strong case within their own organization. For example, translating the documentation into Dutch or French if it's not available already. And this is a really simple one. A little bit of acknowledgement goes a long way. Carry out and get your customers to carry out an audit of the software that they're using and then create a page on your website where you just give a credit to all the open source projects that you're using with a link to the projects. That's a great thing to do. Publish an annual open source audit. Just once a year do an audit of what software you're using. Estimate the savings and write a brief one page report. If companies did that, we'd have case studies. They'd make the case internally for contributing money. It's a really good starting point for an organization. If you've got one champion in the organization and they do this once a year, you watch the change. I've seen it happen and organizations have gone when they've seen these figures internally. They said we should contribute. And the final thing, and this is usually addressed to users, so excuse this one, but when you're choosing consultants, if you're a user, you don't want to choose the leeches. The leeches are the people who say, oh, we can advise you on open source software, but actually they're not putting anything back into our community. You want the people who are making the contributions to the community. And we need to encourage people once they've decided to use free and open source software to work with the companies who are actually contributing to the community rather than just leaching off it. So I'm almost finished now and I'm on time. There's a sort of ying and yang of open source balancing between being a user and being a contributor. If you use Phosphogy in your organization, you need to encourage that organization to contribute time. If you're working for a Phosphogy business, you need to be trying to articulate these messages to your customers because it will help you to grow the community, to grow the income, to pay the mortgage and all of that. So my last message to you is think about what you're going to contribute in the next year. May the Phosphogy be with you. It's timing. Just look at that timing because it's awesome. Not a word. Great. No, none whatsoever. Please happily earning their keep. I see a question. Thank you. Hello. My name is Matti Pesua. I come from Finland. A question regarding on how to manage different organizations. If I can collect, let's say for example five organizations from Finland and we want to create a new feature to serve it in open source software, are there some bodies or some organizations that can sort of run the project for us or some models that we can look at so that we don't have to sort of make the whole thing up by ourselves and to invent how to manage the money coming from a few different organizations. I would suggest that most projects have a steering committee. Well, in fact, all projects have a steering committee. If you start with the steering committee, they would be the people who would direct you to one or more of the developers that are contributing code. Probably the route to that is to pick an organization maybe that's geographically close to you or for some other reason. Ultimately, you need to pick an organization who contributes code and say, here's what we need. There's two things you have to do. One, you have to work out how much is it going to cost. Two, you have to actually get that organization to steer the feature set that you're looking for, the enhancement that you're looking through, through whatever the approval process is in that project. Each project is different. The first point to call would be find the project steering committee. The second one is choose one of the contributing organizations. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.
 Okay, while we are setting up the shop again, I want to introduce to you Stephen Felton.  I met him for the first time earlier this year for a rather English tea somewhere in  the middle of London and he is one of the few people who I think have really shown that  you can be an open source evangelist and a business savvy person while remaining a nice  and approachable person.  Quite often it's said that open source and business don't go well together.  Well here's a living proof.  Okay, thank you.  May the first be with you.  So it bugs me when people say that open source isn't free because you have to pay for support  and services.  It bugs me when people complain about bugs in the open source software but don't do anything  about it.  So this is an involving thought process.  I want you to start to think about why people should be paying for free software.  As it's an involving thought process, I call it a beta version.  So right up front, let me make some confessions to you.  I'm an evangelist.  I'm a business person, as Mark said.  I'm not a code writer.  This talk is about evangelism for business within an open source community.  So just bear that in mind.  Have you ever wondered what makes free, how does free software work?  I mean, is it something that you think about?  What I want to do is I want to talk to the community today.  Usually this talk is addressed primarily to users of open source software.  But this is a community of people who make the software, who develop the software.  And what I want to do is give you a few thoughts about how you can evangelize to users and  to potential users the reason that they should engage with professional open source businesses  and how they can move from just being users of free software to contributors to open source  software.  And I think sometimes in this community, we're suspicious of businesses within open source  gear.  I think there's a very different attitude within our sister community at Location Tech.  And I think in this regard, probably in many other regards as well, we can learn from them  as I'm sure they can learn from us.  So a couple of questions for you to wake you up because you've been sitting there for a  while.  Who here works for a company that's sponsored them to come?  Company or an organization that's sponsored them to come here?  Okay.  Who's an individual who's come under their own buck?  Okay.  Just looking around the room, that tells you something.  How many of you work in academia or the public sector?  So quite a lot of people working in academia and public center sponsored to come here.  Okay.  And now how many of you develop or consult with open source geo software?  So that's quite a lot of you.  Okay.  So we're on the right track here.  And finally, out of those people, how many actually contribute code?  Right.  Okay.  So this is a code writing audience of people mainly from a geo business background working  paid for to be here.  So have you ever clicked the donate button?  Now this is a question that I would ask to users very frequently and it's a question  that you should be asking to users.  Do you click the button often, occasionally or never?  I gave this talk a while ago and one person put their hand up and said that they clicked  on the donate button.  I mean, I use QGIS for fun and I donate to the QGIS project because it's such a cool  project.  And if people write software, somebody needs to find a way to help them to keep on doing  it.  So what I'm going to talk about here is a little bit about the Phosphor G community.  Why I think business is important to the Phosphor G community.  How the business models work and many of you may know this and what it means for you and  your organization when you're talking to your customers, how you might use this information.  So I'm going to start by quoting Paul Ramsey.  Quoting Paul Ramsey seems to be part of what goes on at Phosphor G. Paul Ramsey three years  ago explained what Phosphor G is and why it works.  He said, in FOS you get what you pay for.  Everyone gets what you pay for.  You get what everyone pays for.  Now that's a beautiful summary of Phosphor G that you can use when you're talking to  potential clients.  There's a key word in each three lines of it, pay.  It's not free and that's a message that I think we need to work on.  It doesn't mean you can't use it freely but it does mean that somebody has to pay for  it.  If you've got half an hour, find the slides afterwards, follow the link that I put there,  listening to Paul's talk is one of the best half an hours that you can spend in terms  of getting away of articulating the message of Phosphor G.  So who is this community that we're talking about?  Well, it's thousands of people at this event as we've seen at all our other events.  But it's also 39 projects, 50 chapters, 10,000 people signed up to over 200 mailing lists,  a website that's in 15 languages, 245 businesses registered as solution developers and providers  and something like 7,200 people employed in those companies, not of all of whom work  on Phosphor G. This is not a small community, it's a big community.  I wanted to work out how big this community was.  I wanted to get some numbers.  Why did I do this?  People were asking me why are you doing this survey, Stephen?  And the reason I'm doing the survey is when you're sitting in front of a potential client  and maybe the opposition is a very, very large proprietary software company with a billion  dollars of revenue and X thousand employees, being able to talk about your community and  present it as a cohesive whole, even though it's distributed, gives you a very powerful  tool in defending against the fud that's fear, uncertainty and doubt that your competitors  may well try and use to win business against you.  So let me give you...  So I conducted this survey, I have to qualify and say I have a moderate number of responses  to the survey.  I've used some fairly crude stats to scale it up to give me an estimate of the overall  OSGO economy.  It's very rough numbers.  If more organizations who are here contributed to the survey, which would take you five minutes,  we'd get more accurate numbers that I could share with everybody.  So there are 120 to 150 active companies developing consulting with OSGO software.  There are somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 employees engaged in this activity.  There's somewhere between 150 and $200 million worth of revenue associated with this activity.  These are quite big numbers.  This is a good-sized software business we're talking about.  We may be here, I'm a one-man business, somebody else is a 10-man business, boundless is maybe  a 100-man business, the biggest.  But overall, this is a pretty big organization.  So those numbers are worth bearing in mind and they're useful, I believe.  Now if you want to contribute, the URL is somewhat easy to remember, Bitly Phosphogy  Survey, I'll put the slides up available afterwards so you can go and find it.  It would take you two minutes to contribute to the survey.  So why is it going on about this?  I just want to write code is what you're thinking, but you're staying here, which is kind of  you, thank you.  So I'm going to quote myself and there was a long debate about something on a mailing  list.  There was far too much time on OSG and mailing lists and it was about business and stuff  like that.  So I said, I believe that the long-term sustainability of Phosphogy is at least in part dependent  on successful businesses that employ developers, consultants, and support the community in  its events.  I'd go further.  A healthy business community based on Phosphogy is the evidence that we're developing the  right products that people need and want to use and it is how we build the community  for everybody.  So now I've got a dispeller myth and I've got to say thank you to Andrea who she knows  that I quote her on this.  She wrote, some say that the participants in Phosph communities are in fact compensated  for their labor, not with money but with social capital.  The not compensated part with money is misleading.  We know now that probably 80% of code is contributed by people who are employed by companies to  contribute code.  That is a great thing.  It doesn't mean that there isn't a place for volunteers in our community but it does  mean that we need to recognize where most of the code is coming from, a lot of the support  is coming from, and we should embrace that.  So even though code is contributed by people who are paid for it, some does come from volunteers  and one thing we should remember is even the volunteers need pizza.  You don't get code sprints with volunteers coming to code sprints without providing accommodation,  without providing catering, without providing facilities.  The budget for the code sprints I'll come to but it wasn't trivial the amount of money  that goes to putting on the code sprints here.  So bear that in mind.  And then we come to support, which is the backbone of a lot of businesses in open source.  And people say you can get support via the mailing list or you can get it on Stack Exchange.  Well, I want to say this and excuse me for swearing, but what the fuck are you thinking  about customer?  If you think you can post on a mailing list at 10 o'clock at night and get support ready  for the following morning because your solution is broken.  If this is business critical software, then it needs business critical support.  And if you were buying it from a proprietary vendor, you would pay the equivalent of the  initial purchase cost over the first four years in support.  So there is no reason at all why people should not be paying for support.  And I think we have a culture which sometimes is reluctant to say you need to pay for that.  And it's something that we shouldn't rely on the goodwill of volunteers to solve customers  problems.  So this talk was entitled, There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.  So I thought I'd let you know how much a free lunch costs.  It costs around 700 euros a person.  I know I said 640.  It's closer to 700 euros a person to run a conference here in this fantastic venue.  Before somebody says, well, we don't need to be in this fantastic venue, you're absolutely  right.  We don't.  It's very nice, but we don't need to be here.  But go find a venue that can support 850 or 1,000 people and you'll find that they all  charge quite a lot of money.  It costs a lot of money to run this venue.  The average delegate income of paying delegates at this event is 595 euros.  You don't have to be an accountant to see there's a gap.  That's before the students come.  That's before the bursaries.  That's before the various other passes that we give to people and we want to give more  passes to more people.  And the way we make it work is with sponsorship.  Sponsorship this year at Phosphor G is working out at 160 euros a person.  That's impressive.  Thank you to the sponsors.  But it's understanding how this whole thing hangs together.  The code sprint was funded by OOSDO and Phosgis.  The total bill for the code sprint is over $10,000.  This is not cheap.  Someone has to pay for open source software or for free software.  It's not really free.  That's why I say there's no such thing as a free lunch.  Quick summary of what pays the bills.  You'll know this.  What pays the bills is sponsored features, implementation services, etc.  You know this.  So here are a few thoughts, first of all, for individuals who use Phosphor G. There  are two ways you can be an open source citizen.  You can contribute your time.  You can contribute your money.  It's as simple as that.  If you're an organization, it's a little bit more complex.  And what we need, the large organizations that use our software to do, in my opinion,  is to cross the chasm from being a user organization to being a contributing organization.  To becoming a contributor.  What do I mean by being a contributing organization?  Well, fundamentally, quoting Paul Ramsey again, using is not the same as supporting.  And also, organization supports open source with time and money.  So we're back to time and money for organizations.  And here is my five point plan.  Take it away with pleasure.  Use it, adapt it.  Because I think some of this is how we engage with the user community to make them become  the supporting contributing community.  It's a five point plan.  First point, how much should you be contributing?  This is a really important question.  When you're talking to an organization, how much should they be contributing?  And the answer is, it's up to you.  But work out your savings.  Work out how much you save by using free and open source software.  Be very, very conservative on that calculation.  And then maybe contribute 5% of your savings, 10% of your savings.  Any amount of, any calculation that you do that is based on savings and takes a tiny  proportion of those savings starts that organization on a journey to becoming a contributor.  You can contribute hard cash.  You can donate to projects, sponsor features, sponsor the foundation, sponsor an event.  You can contribute time.  And an important point to bear in mind for those of us who don't write code is that there  is, you can be a contributor to this community without writing code.  We need documentation.  We need testing.  We need feedback.  We probably need some UI skills and research.  And we certainly need translation.  So there are lots of things that you can contribute that don't involve code.  And these are things that organizations that use the software may well have a really strong  case within their own organization.  For example, translating the documentation into Dutch or French if it's not available  already.  And this is a really simple one.  A little bit of acknowledgement goes a long way.  Carry out and get your customers to carry out an audit of the software that they're  using and then create a page on your website where you just give a credit to all the open  source projects that you're using with a link to the projects.  That's a great thing to do.  Publish an annual open source audit.  Just once a year do an audit of what software you're using.  Estimate the savings and write a brief one page report.  If companies did that, we'd have case studies.  They'd make the case internally for contributing money.  It's a really good starting point for an organization.  If you've got one champion in the organization and they do this once a year, you watch the  change.  I've seen it happen and organizations have gone when they've seen these figures internally.  They said we should contribute.  And the final thing, and this is usually addressed to users, so excuse this one, but when you're  choosing consultants, if you're a user, you don't want to choose the leeches.  The leeches are the people who say, oh, we can advise you on open source software, but  actually they're not putting anything back into our community.  You want the people who are making the contributions to the community.  And we need to encourage people once they've decided to use free and open source software  to work with the companies who are actually contributing to the community rather than  just leaching off it.  So I'm almost finished now and I'm on time.  There's a sort of ying and yang of open source balancing between being a user and being a  contributor.  If you use Phosphogy in your organization, you need to encourage that organization to  contribute time.  If you're working for a Phosphogy business, you need to be trying to articulate these  messages to your customers because it will help you to grow the community, to grow the  income, to pay the mortgage and all of that.  So my last message to you is think about what you're going to contribute in the next year.  May the Phosphogy be with you.  It's timing.  Just look at that timing because it's awesome.  Not a word.  Great.  No, none whatsoever.  Please happily earning their keep.  I see a question.  Thank you.  Hello.  My name is Matti Pesua.  I come from Finland.  A question regarding on how to manage different organizations.  If I can collect, let's say for example five organizations from Finland and we want to  create a new feature to serve it in open source software, are there some bodies or some organizations  that can sort of run the project for us or some models that we can look at so that we  don't have to sort of make the whole thing up by ourselves and to invent how to manage  the money coming from a few different organizations.  I would suggest that most projects have a steering committee.  Well, in fact, all projects have a steering committee.  If you start with the steering committee, they would be the people who would direct  you to one or more of the developers that are contributing code.  Probably the route to that is to pick an organization maybe that's geographically close to you  or for some other reason.  Ultimately, you need to pick an organization who contributes code and say, here's what  we need.  There's two things you have to do.  One, you have to work out how much is it going to cost.  Two, you have to actually get that organization to steer the feature set that you're looking  for, the enhancement that you're looking through, through whatever the approval process is  in that project.  Each project is different.  The first point to call would be find the project steering committee.  The second one is choose one of the contributing organizations.  All right.  Thanks.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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