hi William,

thanks for your message :) its encouraging to read you.

plus funny to read Devuan turning almost into a DonJuan :^D

On Sat, 13 Jan 2018, William C Vaughan wrote:

>    From the perspective of a retired programmer/analyst, now
>    dilletante, you Dejuan folks are on the precipice of success. See
>    the forest over the trees, get your message out as an upstream
>    solution to Linux in the enterprise - from servers to employee
>    desktop/laptop solutions, there is no reason that systemd-free
>    Linux alternatives can’t supplant the Red Hat, etc., cabal. They
>    have MONEY, and that buys them exposure. My former employer, a
>    major university, has bought Red Hat support hook, line, and
>    sinker. You guys aren’t even on the radar.

I very much agree with you, we have an opportunity and we should seize
it "soonish". In most EU and US based organisations I believe
enterprise-level ICT contracts will expire around 2019 and 2020 and
will need to be renovated or may be changed. If we are consolidated by
then, have a reasonable amount of money to reinvest in Devuan for
entreprise level services (a 10% of the donations going to Debian
would be enough to get started) and perhaps have our own
certification... we can play the game at the table with these giants
and be a palatable investment for people with old money who understand
how fast tables can flip in ICT.

There are also more sources of investment that can help us stand on
our feet: sponsorships as well institutional projects that Dyne.org is
doing and that are based on Devuan (see i.e. DECODEproject.eu)

However *now* we must concentrate on quality and details, because our
(still limited, as you say) audience doesn't cares about marketing
speech, but about details and perfectionism. That's what we are doing
and that's also what puts us an inch above all those saying you can
use Debian without systemd and then "take care of the small details".

After ASCII we need all to get out there and talk about Devuan to the
people who can help it grow and likely also make a gain in doing so. I
am confident this will work, we actually had already an amazing
coverage all considered. Here in Amsterdam we are creating this year
a limited responsibility company that may be able to provide some
degree of entreprise level service to customers and some of its shares
will be available to new aligned investors.

We'll see. And certifications, again, I think they are quite important
and there is nothing holding us from making a no-nonsense
certification course in ... good'ol UNIX minimalism :^)

ciao