We all live in a world that made us earn money to get ourselves a life. No doubt of that. Of course, most of things we do are for money, if not all. In the past few months, I was paid for making a desktop-ready Debian based Linux distribution for Persian-speaking users called Sana Desktop. In parallel, I started Caprice Linux as a hobby project and of course, a test ground for ideas I had for Sana Desktop.

Now, conditions have been changed. I still collaborate with Sana. I’m not ashamed of being a part of a professional team who develop Free/Libre Software. At least, we’re proud of being the developers of a piece of free software and not Not having bash on our computers. Anyway, that collaboration is not monetized for now. We have been told that this will happen, so I’m not sad, mad or angry about that.

But it made me think about my personal project, Caprice Linux. Of course this project will be alive as long as I can pay for servers and the domain we have. But I was thinking of the monetization of the project. In this article, there’ll be a few ideas about monetization.

Ideas for monetization of the project

Don’t know if you have watched the movie The Social Network by David Fincher, which shows us how one of our real-life evil technology companies came to existence. In one scene, Mark Zuckerberg says :

Facebook is cool, but we still don’t know what it is.

I still have the same opinion about Caprice Linux. But let’s be honest, the project has the chance to be monetized. So I list a few things in the list below :

  • Support: Of course having a professional support team helps. But it helps when the project is vastly used. For now, I don’t even know how many people installed Caprice Linux as their desktop operating system.
  • Selling Merch: It is a good idea. I still doubt it’s helpfulness, but it’s a way to advertise the project and make money at the same time.
  • Donations: We don’t have any good donation platform which can cover All people of the world. We still may need PayPal or WebMoney for countries other than Iran, and using services like ZarinPal for people who live inside Iran. It just makes it a bit difficult. But if you want be a donor, let me know in the chat room or the community forums.

These were the possible ways to monetize it as a normal hobby project, but something bigger came to my mind. I decided to write it in a separate section in this article!

Caprice Enterprise Linux

A few weeks ago, I made a Debian GNU/Linux image, installed it on a virtual machine, made it cloud-ready and uploaded it to my panel on Arvan Cloud and it worked. I just simply called the image Cloud Enterprise Linux and I had spoke to one of my greatest friends Amirmohammad Kouyeshpour, who currently leads Ilam Linux Users Group (Ilam Lug for short) and he was positive about the project.

It’s a long time we haven’t talked about this project but the conversations we had about an enterprise solution, just made me think and even work hard to get an acceptable output for the project. There’s a big possibility of having Caprice Enterprise Linux in the near future.

What will happen to Caprice Linux (The desktop edition)?

Nothing will happen to that baby. It’s based on the Debian Stable and it will be updated with the next stable release of the Debian GNU/Linux. Nothing will change. We will work on our desktop edition and it will be called Caprice Linux Community. As it’s made by the help of a community of great people.

Plans for Caprice Linux Community will be published soon. Do not worry, we’ll never give up on the desktop market.