Re: demand for Kawa support?

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Jocelyn Paine wrote:

>However, the terms suggested are way beyond what a UK
>university would pay for per-user support, unless perhaps the system is
>being used by every student in a department.
>
To make sure there are no misunderstandings:  The price of $2400/year is
per "contact point", not per user.  You can support a 100 users on that, as
long as none of them bother me directly.  Instead you would be responsible
for filtering out the trivial questions, reproducing the problem, and
submitting a coherent bug report or question.  From a commercial company
if you tried to support a 100 programmers using a single contact point, you
might go crazy - or I might conclude you're abusing the deal, and ask you
to pay more.  In an academic setting, I'd give you some more leeway, but it
would still depend on how well you pre-filter any problems from your users.

>So my point is that in this kind of academic use of Kawa, where a
>department gets most of its money from one-off grants, and doesn't have
>much recurrent fundung to cover overheads, Per's terms are unlikely to be
>administratively feasible. But buying support a month at a time might be
>
Monthly payments of $200 would be acceptable, though not my preference.

>It would also be useful to have an estimate of roughly how many hours of
>support the $2400 would buy; it's the kind of thing one has to fill in in
>the budget form when making applications.
>
I figure if it works out to less than $50/hour, then it isn't worth my 
time.  So
if you need a number, put down 48.  (Of course my normal non-Kawa consulting
rate would be higher than that!)