[hcflinux] Suggested Marketing Policy for Modem Drivers

[Martin Hughes]

Dear Marc and colleagues,

The work that you have been doing is excellent and because of this I write
to suggest a possible modification to your present marketing policy for your
modem drivers, in order to possibly prevent you from alienating
acquaintances in the Linux community.

Based on what I was initially looking for, I suggest that you remaster the
free and full drivers to run at the full 56Kb/s. Many newbies (as I was
initially) are simply looking for a free driver that will turn their useless
HCF modem into a functional download tool. This is no worse than the support
that people looking for windows drivers for their modems get. If this were
done, I would then gladly recommend the free driver in response to newsgroup
enquiries relating to the distros that I use (Mandrake, Slackware and
RedHat). Once you have done this, I am sure that people who found such a
driver useful may be prepared to donate if such a channel were made
available.

I do, however, agree that it is reasonable to attempt to charge for
additional features such as voice and fax. These run on top of the basic
Windows drivers and usually have to be paid for anyway if you want a fully
functional package.

Another outlet which I see that you have not tapped into yet is to get your
modem drivers included in a full Linux Distro. Nether Mandrake or Suse offer
your driver as part of their power packs but merely point to your site. I
usually buy Mandrake power packs and would feel happy paying an extra £10
(15$) for a Mandrake power pack which included the fully functional modem
drivers and licence as part of their Commercial Applications CD. You could
also negotiate with Mandrake about including your free modem drivers as part
of thir download version of Linux (provided that you remastered them to run
at 56Kb/s).

The fully functional HCF drivers and licence are gratefully received and I
shall now regression test both sets of HCF modem drivers, using the
tarballs, on  Mandrake/Redhat/Slackware and mail information to the HCF
mailing list. The fully functional version already build/installs on
Slackware 9.0 without any problems.

Regards
Martin Hughes
Resent from my home email