Don’t be too affirmative like this…
@discobot help me explain to Stefano how the life is!
Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
You’re arguing and debating on a steph’s choice… You don’t know why he needs such a structure (which isn’t dedicate to SME and NS only)
So, even if your POV might be interesting, it’s wrong
Proposing him to change his environment to save money so not to ask here for a revenue is not a solution.
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No, no, no… I’m not debating.
I’m not able to decide if Steph is right, or not.
I’m only suggest one thing, one possible solution…
It’s not subversive, it’s not invading… It’s just one point of view ( if it right or wrong is not the question, life things are not black or white… there’s an infinite combination of grey between ).
It’s to Steph to analyse, see if the POV proceed or not… and in what proportions
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@stephdl: Unfortunately I don’t have a solution for you. But be assured your contributions are invaluable for the project and the community. I sure hope that they are invaluable for yourself too. That should be your first concern and satisfaction. Being able to deliver more than decent code and maintain a huge amount of modules that you developed. If I had the means, I would donate. Even on a regular basis. Unfortunately I can only donate time for now. And I do donate as much time as possible to the community by being a regular visitor, respond to questions from our members and initiate activities.
Sadly enough, I just am not a coder, so I can’t spar with you too much and can’t help too much either. But to get ontopic again, it would be a agood thing that all the members that do have an understanding of coding in some way, inspire eachother with ideas and help eachother out when walking into questions. I am sure the @dev_team already is in close contact with eachother. Maybe shouting out to fellow devvers a few times more would be a first step to make you feel less alone in coding country?
I do think it is very important to support you and any other member with initiatives for new or enhanced functionality in NethServer. The @ambassadors_group is the first group of people that can (and should) look into this. Does anyone else has ideas how we can get this topic a place on the foreground of our community?
This is sure a must-have topic to discuss during the NethServer Conference in September in Italy!
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I understand the issues and am encouraged to see the level of discourse within this thread.
I am aware that whilst we (developers, bug-trackers, support / administration specialists and other actives members of this community) are providing support, development and our time because of our own interests and love of this project.
I do also appreciate that some of us are providing support whilst juggling private / home life and work commitments, as well as having limited financial funds to spend on infrastructure costs (ie. purchasing of hardware and / or VPS expenditure).
Like others within this thread, I agree that paid repos do pose a number of problems (ie. testing packages, bug-solving and slowing down of overall development / release schedules). However, whilst thinking about this subject, I did consider how UCS, Zentyal and ClearOS implements their paid software stores (I admit that I am a fan of UCS and do like how they implemented their package management / software store).
I would encourage the usage of a “paypal button” / donate option on more of the public websites / wiki etc. I am wondering about the usage of a Patreon / monthly donation scheme?
Also, something else that would be easy to implement would be the usage of a popup dialogue within the “first-run wizard” of a NS installation. This popup could have links to the donate options (I am thinking akin to Nextcloud / Ownclouds “first-run” popups).
I am now wondering about the usage of “vertical markets” (providing support products, NS related items. As an example, using the shirt / clothing e-store to supplement community development costs – instead of the using the shirt store example, this idea could be implemented in-conjunction with other “wares”, ie. pens, coffee mugs, mouse mats etc.)
I have been toying around an idea of producing an administrator / end-user styled manual / ebook / paperback for a while (in the style of a “for dummies” or O’Reilly manual). What about a community written ebook that provides explanations of each module and includes examples? This ebook could (once published) be sold and the resulting funds could be used for further community development.
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A vps will go down with the bandwith and the users I have. Proxmox is the way because you can separate services by creating different vm. Moreover you need to think to the cost of backup and ip failover, also to get a good provider that you can trust…soyoustart.
Actually mirror.de-labrusse.fr it is about 2000 IP/month and the most of the rpm are for nethserver…exept for smeserver-sogo which is one of my greatest hit. All others are in smecontribs
I host also several mirrors for nethserver, smeserver, archlinux.
Thank @stefano_zamboni, the point was not how to decrease my cost :S
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I know, my friend
Thanks for that Robb, your effort here is essential
Indeed! I will make sure to put that on our agenda. How can we address it in the right way? With a panel?
Can you be more specific? What aspect do you value more?
Uhm, it looks interesting. But how can we receive that money and re-distribute them? It’s not an easy problem.
I was considering the implications of the “paypal button” as described by previous posts within this thread. Sure, I understand that re-distribution of said funds provides it’s own set of problems (ie. the fair distribution, determining what is considered as a contribution of work etc.) but these issues could be resolved with community agreement.
Apart from the wealth of choice that comes with UCS, I do like the idea of a “play-store” style of applications (ie. user chooses a tool / application, then is asked for banking information / paypal details and then has the application installed that server), as well as the idea of integrating their “play-store” functions within the package manager.
As discussed in previous threads, I think that the amount of UCS applications are a bit overwhelming and their amount of choices could be unsuitable for NS community / intended user audience.
Decrease the cost…
Augmenting the revenue…
Why not combine both 
Do something to exit the bad spiral …
Because he’s spending the minimum he has to
but the paypal button could be related directly with the module, so there will be no need to redistribution
me too… it could be a possible but partial solution. I mean, it could be a solution for @stephdl (and this of course would be great), and i think he should try it… being active on more projects probably will lead more people to participate. But I think it’s not a viable solution to “attract/involve more developers” to NS (just to go back on topic)
completely agree with you, for me is the way to go
I agree… the point for me is: the topic of the thread and the experience you reported
If 26 Modules give 1 paypal donation for me this means that there is something that is not working, or at least that revenue will never be a reason to attract devs 
I displayed a paypal button on each module page I did, the link is to my mirror https://mirror.de-labrusse.fr. Of course it is not a safe way, someone could change the url to direct to a personal paypal account.
I can try this and see what it comes…Bye the way, second donations. thanks
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The point is here!
What to do to enlarge this base, and hope a better return.
it’s true for the community, to have more active member.
it’s true for developer to have more revenue.
Communicate better,
Make things easier
Try to find an idea, to avoid struggling
Your work is specific for Nethserver and or SME? With some little modifications is your work can be adapt for Fedora, Centos, RHEL, ClearOS… other rpm based distro?
Jim… Every package like nethserver-xxx or smeserver-xxx is just for NS or SME
it won’t work on any other distro and it is quite easy to understand why
Again, we’re not focusing on how help Steph or abtract other devs
Steph, my 2 cents… Close your repo, think about a “license” key bound to each server… IOW, 1 server, 1 licenze
If you (generally speaking) have 3 servers, you need 3 keys…
Free software does not fit well a closed repo.
I think about Sernet Samba or Inverse SOGo when they closed their repositories.
I don’t catch how such move can improve their business. At a first glance I feel they limit their user base.
They sell services, like you (nethesis) do, so your sentence is a bit strange, isn’t it? 
BTW, the issues here is that many (too many) consider free software as a beer for free, which is not
Another solution: all steph’s modules available from software center but download bound to a mandatory donation
did you never take a look to the Stephdl Repository applet in the dashboard 