Xen Orchestra Community Edition - Registration
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@olivierlambert You may not do that, however what about the notification that appears when that hasn't happened. The icon for this appears even if you can't do that.
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It's by definition displayed on any XO build for the sources.
Thanks for the idea by the way (see my edit)
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@olivierlambert Registration to remove banner is an idea, but some kind of notification on the registered user profile would be helpful. Viewable from their Xen Orchestra account, along with details of instance registered.
Basically have it say on the Xen Orchestra user account profile page, where the registrations are displayed.
A table or list with the following:-
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IP Address/FQDN (or some kind of identifier)
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Xen Orchestra Edition Registered
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Status of support for instance
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Status of updates of xen orchestra for instance
This display panel of registered instances of Xen Orchestra, is for all editions of the product to aid management for all users.
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Right now, there's 0 link/process between the source version and xen-orchestra.com website. So there's no way to know you are registered and use XO from the sources too.
But I agree having this link as an option would be interesting for us, at least to know more about our community
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@olivierlambert I think some kind of registration would be a great idea. I'd also love some kind of way to kick back to you guys for the excellent work you've put into these products that's not a subscription. XCP-NG + XO have let me span my home lab from my basement into a rented office space and into a dedicated box.
I don't generate revenue so a subscription for this would be out of budget, I'd love to kick back something for the work you guys have put in. While not a perfect example, something like Untangle's home license at $50 / $150 per year depending on features would help fill in the gap.
Keeping a registration option to remove the nag in lab environments would still be a nice have
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@gsrfan01 Another option from this would be a low per month option, or a perpetual option.
Also when converted into £ the $50 United States Dollars, would be around £41 per year. Alternatively the $150 dollars per year would be around £123.
This is based on exchanges rates for 30th June 2022 at 15:25.
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This was already discussed countless times. It's not enough to be meaningful to us. Even XOA Starter isn't enough (but we can always try to upsell it, which is interesting).
The main issue is the community size at this time, to get a meaningful revenue for that "community" plan, without hurting regular XOA plans, which is also a problem since you can't discriminate the use-case but let's forgot it for the sake of simplicity.
We'd need 50 to 100 times bigger community. Scale matters when you talk about very small $$ contributions. On average, one full time dev cost between $100k and $150k. So to cover just the price of one dev, you need thousands paid contributors. There's 6 people working full time on XO. That's 18000 paid contributors at $50. Just to cover the costs (and I'm not talking about the structure for the rest, ie everything you have to make it work around, offices, HR, marketing, travel, events and so on). And there's XCP-ng, 10 extra devs to add.
So if you want to reach the point we can have small paid plans for the community/individual, you best contribution possible is to be an ambassador and convince companies to use it (this is where the money is coming from) and/or to have more community users.
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I'm not sure the feasibility of this, but could it be worth while to pay for these?
- Remove the banner at the top of the page
- Be supplied with a first-party script to install / update XO from sources
- 1 road map vote
- Hub access
Leave it as a from sources with no support aside an install / upgrade script. Not sure if that would be a task easy enough for such a low cost option or if it's something better left to the community as it is already. Essentially getting XoA's free tier features but without the support and appliance.
That would be something I would happily pay for. I don't need support and enjoy having the delta backups but I can't justify $2400 / year to host some wordpress sites and minecraft servers for friends.
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I clearly get what you mean and be assured we don't want to make individuals to pay those amounts!
Starting to sell to individuals means a complete different purchase management (VAT of the your country in EU for example) which is costly to put in place first (especially vs the revenue).
But also what about the risk of greedy corporation to use this plan instead of XOA Enterprise?
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The VAT and purchase process makes sense, I hadn't thought of that part.
Would a greedy corp not use XO from sources and get nearly all of the Enterprise features for free? I suppose the warnings might dissuade someone or help convince a manager to upgrade. Though I could easily block / remove the warning text if I were nefarious enough. If I wanted some Hub features I could install the Free XoA instance and co-manage between sources and XoA Free.
My main gripe is with the top banner when first logging in, I don't mind the side bar one much at all and wouldn't complain about that being left in, maybe with a change to "Community Support Only"
The "value add" for me would be:
- Supporting you guys in a small way while building out my skillset with XoA to better enable me to pitch it
- Removing the need to spin up an XoA free instance when I needed to use hub for something
- Getting a roadmap vote
- Saving me a click on login
A first-party install script would be nice but isn't something required IMO since there are plenty of community driven ones; https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater is excellent and the proxy even works.
Side Note: I've been rummaging around the XCP-NG forums the last couple days after not using it and have been very impressed with you and the team's responses here, many FOSS leaders tend to treat the community rather poorly when they get large enough but you guys are doing an impressive job.
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- Greedy corp. had issues in general to deal with big red banners in production
If they don't, it means everyone is OK to do it, which we can't do anything against, they are free to do so (but at least they can't hide it). It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing - In general, it's hard to explain clearly the value of support (which is more than "traditional support", cf https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/05/06/my-vision-for-open-source-pro-support/ for more details).
For the rest, all of that makes sense at a certain level. I'm not against it, but so far, with the current numbers, it's too risky. But starting to have a more precise count of community usage of XO might be helpful to move forward in the future!
- Greedy corp. had issues in general to deal with big red banners in production
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Happy to do baby steps
If / when you guys add some kind of "register" option to get a count on things I'd add my instance(s), as long as it doesn't break the existing install / upgrade scripts at least!Generally I have no issues with just clicking it away since I'm the only one that sees it. If it were a viable option sometime in the future, those would be my ideal "features". I've really enjoyed using XO coming from ESXi / vCenter at work and formerly running my home lab.
Your vision of support is similar to Nutanix's which is partially why we went their route for our server overhaul and I think it's excellent. I'm hoping by the time we're due for a refresh the hyper-converged offering is fleshed out and production ready. Though I would miss my integrated firmware upgrades.
