"Guide to Installation" my foot!

[Rick Thomas]

> Used disc images snagged from bit torrent, but will be buying the 
> distro shortly . . . Or at least some shirts from the goodies 
> page . . . (anybody know which ends up helping them the most 
> financially?? I'd either buy the geek edition or a t-shirt and a 
> couple of sweat shirts . . .)

I'll risk being accused of answering the question "what time is it" 
with a description of how to build a clock:

Let's do the arithmetic.


It's a gross simplification, but one way of figuring these things 
out is to divide the costs into "up-front" and "marginal" 
components.

Marginal costs are such things as the incremental cost of adding 
one to the number ordered from the foundry, plus cost of packaging 
ans storage prior to shipping, and the cost of shipping+handling a 
package to you, and so so.  In other words, everything that is 
proportional to the number of items sold.

Up-Front costs is everything else that is not proportional to the 
number sold: the cost of compiling and organizing the RPMs, 
installation software, etc, into a bootable set of CD images, 
preparing the CD masters and the T-shirt art work, some pro-rated 
portion of the salaries for the staff-programmers / artists / 
accountants / secretaries / sales-folk / etc, etc, etc.

The total of all the receipts minus the total of all marginal costs 
(the marginal profit) has to pay for the up-front costs, hopefully 
with a little bit left over for the shareholders.


Th CD's marginal cost to them is a couple of bucks per CD -- times 
6 for a "geek edition" box.

The marginal cost of the T-shirts is about $9-$10 per shirt.

The up-front costs are harder to estimate, but they are almost 
certainly higher for the CDs than for the T-shirts.


So a Geek edition CD set, at $25 price to you and marginal cost to 
them about $10-$15, gives a marginal profit of $10-$15.

A pair of XX-L T-shirts, at $28 price to you and marginal cost to 
them about $18-$20, gives a marginal profit of $8-$10.

That's the marginal profit, of course -- The up-front costs have to 
be paid as well, decreasing the overall profit even more.  So, 
before you conclude that you will do them the most good by buying a 
box of CDs, keep in mind that the up-front cost to them of the CDs 
is larger (by an amount I can't estimate very well).


Then there are the imponderables:  The software is their raison 
d'etre.  If they loose money on T-shirts, they can stop selling 
T-shirts without affecting their CD business.  If they consistently 
lose money on the CDs, they would have to go out of business, 
T-shirts and all.


Does this help?

Enjoy!

Rick


PS -- For what it's worth, my figures come from the folk music 
performer business where the quantities involved are in the few 
hundreds to small thousands of units.  Hopefully YDL's quantities 
are higher than that by an order of magnitude or two.  This may 
mean that my estimated cost figures are higher than they should be, 
and profit figures are lower than they should be..