I was thinking of making some thumbdrives, too, but my budget is limited, unfortunatly. There is also less space on a thumbdrive than on a dvd for printing 
Less space is also less infos that becomes outdated. Even if you are using RW DVD you’re tied with what you printed on the sleeve. If you have a stock of USB keys left after an event, you only have to update them with new version to be ready the year after.
The drawback is that you put your logo on something that people can modify and reuse for something completely different. This can be a problem is they use it for something illegal. You probably wouldn’t be sued but your image can suffer. To be honest, I think that the risk is low and that’s only something to think about when you chose what’s printed.
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If you use the beta release image, no problem.
If you make changes, you probably need to ask Haiku inc, but if you make only small changes (such as resizing the partition), there shouldn’t be a problem.
But is it a good USB drive? Fast and reliable? Or will it be slow and crashy and randomly eat data?
The inc budget is an on-demand thing: send them an email and ask if they would consider it. Then send them an invoice when the thing is done.
Again, the goal of the DVD is not to distribute the software. It is more a way to celebrate a release with some type of physical token. We have shipped some software that’s good enough and stable enough for burning (forever) into a DVD.
If you switch to any erasable media, that part of it is lost. And then, honestly, just tell people to download Haiku from the website. That will be more convenient for everyone.
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I use haiku every day from a USB pen drive. I have two, one with the nightly build and one with the official version. Obviously, the USB drive must be very good. I haven’t used kdl for at least two years. It’s an easy way for me to use haiku on any machine at home or in the office without having to change partitions.
I didn’t say Haiku works badly on USB drives generally. But my experience with promotional drives (the one with some company advertising or so) is they tend to be the cheapest possible things, not very reliable and slow.
It would not be a great choice to showcase Haiku, then.
You could give away cheap USB sticks with the Haiku image and a utility to write it to another USB stick that you plug into your computer.
Or you could just give people a download link. On the DVD sleeve there is a QR code with a link to the website. Why make things more complicated and generate electronic waste for no reason?
Sometimes, people get stoked to have a Haiku-branded flash drive Sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.
my motivation would be to give away 16GB sticks, as they are the size of the recomended os default.
Just to show how great haiku runs, even on a usb. Without peeps having to overwrite any OS to try.
I agree with pulkomandy, no point in using bad drives. I’d rather forego the branding and buy good ones if branded ones are not reliable.
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USB drives seem like a great physical token unlike DVDs that are nearing uselessness in this day and age where next to no new computers even have optical drives. They can be useful for as long as they work even if someone is not interested in Haiku or the release becomes outdated so it can actually reduce ewaste compared to handing out DVDs.
I have a number of very old drives that were handed out for promotional purposes that I grab one of when I need to write an OS install image so they keep getting used and the quality was good enough for that at least in the past but if someone is going this route they should certainly try to make sure they don’t get something that will break after a few uses. I do tend to prefer microSD and a reader but those might not really be a thing in this type of marketing.
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I just looked at current prices and a 32GB Sandisk stick costs less than 4€ here in austria.
There is no reason to hand out garbage-sticks instead.
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The garbage are what the print companies have in stock usually, though; and the good quality ones often have no space to print on.
Some years ago an entire batch of branded “4GB” USB sticks that were printed with a logo for my employer turned out to be fake, 128MB or less with loop filesystems.
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Printing businesses and the like will buy the cheapest they can from China. Often fake ( sdcards inside, fake capacities ) or very low-quality flash chips inside.
If it is not from a recognized brand, bought from somewhre that needs to honor their warranty/name ( so, ebay and similar excluded ) you should not trust it for important things,.
For a promotioin, even the $4 disks could be a little costly ( multiply that for 200-300 ) . But it is an alternative.
Since the DVDs already exist, they are good enough to be used now. When there are not any more dvds in stock, a new kind of flyer can be devised.
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