Hi all, the Promotion Team is investigating DVDs/USBs people can order for Beta3. Just so we have an idea of how many people are interested, it would be appreciated if you could fill out the poll below.
0 voters
Why not reserve the physical media for R1 itself? Beta releases sound insignificant in comparison. Also, it’s merely a drop in the bucket, but let’s not create more electronic waste when we can do it all digitally.
For R1, it would be nice to have USB pen drives and SD cards maybe? We could also create a nice booklet to go with it. It can be a regular boxed release with all the goodies inside.
I would apreciate a Haiku branded usb thumb drive with usb3, even if this ammounts to an image one has to pay 30 euros for or so. Not a fan of 2gb throwaway ones or so
An USB key with Haiku logo looks good as a goodie. No version specified, but last “stable” image on it when ordered.
For the record, for beta1 I have shipped about 500 DVDs around the world, including about 100 given to people directly at FOSDEM. It helped greatly in encouraging people to donate us some money at FOSDEM (I think about 200€ collected in 2 days).
These sales at FOSDEM were probably to people not typically visiting these forums.
The advantage of DVDs in this context is they are very cheap to make and ship (using standard mail and not as parcels). With USB drives or even DVDs with larger packaging, this can suddenly become a lot less interesting financially.
If available, I would purchase a DVD to continue my optical media set that I have from the Haiku Alphas and Beta 1. Probably would also order a USB stick as well for convenience and beings that it would be Haiku branded.
Hi all, sorry for not keeping everyone updated. I went and got a quote with a company called Disk that makes USBs and DVDs:
Quantity 50 each
DVD printed with paper sleeve 4.95 each
1GB USB with upload 5.95
Disk offers fulfillment on demand, but we have to order a batch, so I asked them to quote the price for the smallest possible batch. Once the batches are nearly sold out then we order more.
I’ve been in contact with @leavengood and he said that the cost is probably not really worth it, considering DVDs and USBs are quite cheap, and at that point we would not recoup much of the costs from ordering physical media.
Seeing as the majority of people aren’t interested in either physical format, we could consider not having DVDs or USBs for Beta3 - we can always do it for R1 since it is a big milestone.
Another option is to just order USBs, since that is the second most popular option on the poll. However, USBs are more expensive than DVDs, and people would question why we couldn’t just order DVDs instead, since those are cheaper, which is a third option.
Thanks for the update!
I votes for USB only, but i am uninterested in “just installer” usb drives, especially 1GB ones, I would much rather have a nice 64gb or 32gb reliable Usb3 drive branded Haiku, without any specific version printed on it, that’d make it a bit more timeless and allow to actually use the system on the thumb drive for quit some time.
If this is considered It might be worth it to investigate beforehand whether haiku plays nice with long term usb installs, e.g if there is useless writes that wear down the medium or so, if the sync time to disk is good enough to make accidental unplugs less fatal and such.
Edit: I checked around a bit and buying blank dvd stickers is about 8€ for 50 stickers, and they can be printed with some household printers (I have one but never tried that), adding the cost of a blank dvd and 5€ per dvd seems a bit much to me :g
Ah, that’s a good option as well, just having blank USBs for people to put whatever they want on them! That’ll be much easier to procure too, there’s another company that does them purely on-demand so we only pay for how many people order.
Ah ok, seems like a lot of hassle to me though. 
Quite a lot of computers now ship without DVD/CD drives, but all (I think) have a USB port.
As I said, I would love a Haiku branded USB key as a goodie to buy for supporting the project, and it can be pre-formatted with the last stable build of Haiku.
Thing is, preloading data is harder especially since we have special requirements (the USB drive needs to be bootable which I’m not sure if the manufacturers can do or not).
That’s not really the right way to go about it. Small batches are costly because the main thing you are paying for is the setup for all the tools. It makes little sense to set up a printer, calibrate it, etc, to print just 50 DVD sleeves (if that’s even included in the offer, your quote says “paper sleeve” so maybe not even that?). Same for the DVD burning, it takes more time to set up the machine than to let it run through the 50 (or 100 or 500) DVDs and that’s the main part of what you’re paying for.
When I did the DVDs for beta1, I found that the cost for 500 or 1000 DVDs was about the same. 500€ for 500 DVDs, and 570€for 1000 DVDs.
Knowing that we sold about 500 DVDs for beta1, why not ask for a batch of 500? They would probably go for a more reasonable unit price then.
If it’s the same quality as a “print it yourself” DVD I don’t really see the point. The idea is to celebrate releases with something professinally made and worth collecting.
Oh well, I guess we can let someone else make money by selling DVDs if we don’t do it ourselves. Searching “Haiku” on ebay for example will give you several offers like these:
It seems a bit unfortunate that none of the money there gets to Haiku inc.
One of us should sell the DVD or USB installers on eBay, call it “official”; send the money to Haiku inc.
Good point. I’ll ask them.
Hi all, another update regarding the USB/DVDs.
As @PulkoMandy suggested I asked how much 500 and 1000 DVDs/USBs were, here’s what they said:
The pricing would be the same the next price break is 250 and for shipping you would add a mailer .49 cents plus the fulfillment charge 3.00 plus freight plus maintenance fee of 175.00 per month .
The whole freight maintenance fee is probably something the Inc. would balk at, and additionally, I think we need to have some sort of online storefront (i.e. Shopify), so I don’t think this is very feasible.
Good call, yeah, no way are we doing that. It is more than we pay for our servers at Digital Ocean and our file storage at Wasabi.
We can consider this again for R1, but I just think these days physical media is kind of out of style, especially DVDs. Some branded USB sticks might be nice but as nephele suggests it might be better if they were more useful and not just throwaway low quality 1 GB sticks.
Agree. Industrywide, CD/DVDs internal drives are considered outdated for newer computers. Yet, many legacy computers have CD/DVD drives…
Costwise, you can buy 200-pk CDs/DVDs for around $34 USD retail.Provide some silkscreened CDs with a nice front/back printed CD jacket (usually costs around $100 USD for 5000 jacket prints). Additionally, you can provide a Haiku logo imprinted USB flash drive with recent HaikuPorts ported packages.
I’m running Haiku R1B3 with GCC 11.2.0 and Mesa 21.0.3 packages on USB 3.0…
I do find the DVDs really useful for booting old machines that can’t boot from USB, as the only other way is to remove the HDD and install on a different machine, then move the HDD back again… which is quite a pain. I used the beta 1 DVDs a lot, and since then burned my own. It’s also nice to have physical release media. I’d buy and use USB sticks too. It would be really nice if you could buy a DVD box that had a DVD and a USB stick in it (hey I can dream right).
But I also understand that the waste is a problem if people are just getting them to put on a shelf or they end up in landfill, so am happy to burn my own.
Well that’s definitely something to consider for R1. We could probably do a crowdfunding run or something like that, so we have pre-orders. In that case there isn’t really a risk of losing money in the process since the number of orders is known.
For the beta versions it’s probably not worth it, however, and I think the DVDs I ordered were a nice compromise (not too expensive, and still reasonably nice). Also they were light enough that I could ship them as standard letters, keeping the cost reasonable. But I guess something in the shape of a video DVD case would work too. Not a lot of space for a nice printed user guide, however… 