As some of you may know, e_mattis and I have been busy exploring the possibility of
a Puppy for the small and/or home business.
As hansol has stated recently, here
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... ost#769844
and in the following messages, a small entrepreneur can save a lot of money using
Puppy. Furthermore, he found that setting up a Puppy for business was easier than
doing so on another major distro.
e_mattis has already published his Small Business Puppy about 16 months ago, which
is focused on Point-of-Sale. It can be obtained at:
http://data.deadaccurate.com/SBPiso.tar.gz, but also at ally's Internet Archive,
Puppy section, and at Puppus DogFellows' more selective site.
As for me, I adopted another approach and opted for assembling in a single pet a
number of business templates and resources accessible through a icon and menu on
the desktop. It can be downloaded here: http://www.datafilehost.com/d/49eed372.
It resulted from discussions on the general business thread on the French side of this
board, at:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... ost#668395
If you know French, it's worth the effort. It's a great resource, if I may say so! You'll find
there a lot of useful URL's and projects for business, from both sides of the Atlantic,
not just in French.
Obviously, the business field is huge, and no one person can consider having all the
skills necessary to come up with a Business Puppy satisfying a majority of business
operators.
So we need help. I'll re-post a private post by Eric, which sums up nicely the type of
help that is needed to bring such a Puppy to fruition.
Contributions from Puppy-ists with Puppy and business experience in one of the fieldshey musher0,
(...) It would have to incorporate some accounting, some inventory, some time/
employee management, a POS, and possibly some advertising. Those are the main
areas I can think of at the moment. (...)
Eric
above will be welcome. We'd also like to hear from people having experience with co-
ops and / or community-business models, not just from single-operator and/or small
corporation-type businesses. Business is business, and we need all sorts of focuses
to enlighten the project at this point.
One level up from the nuts and bolts of putting an Enterprise Puppy together, ideas are
also welcome on the subjects of:
- financing (crowd-sourcing?) such a project (or not!), pros and cons, etc.
- what to watch for in dealing with / respecting GPL, BSD licences and the like,
- how to present the finished product (CD, USB, PuppyBox (?!), whatever) and
- pricing ? Or should it remain all free...
__ (A lot of work and added-value is going to go in in this project though. If free, how do
__ you motivate the contributors to a business Puppy?)
- marketing the project generally.
Also, on the computer front:
- in your experience (yes, experience, not opinion, please), is there a Puppy
version that would be best-suited for Puppy Enterprise. (This means among other
things a Puppy with drivers for not-so-old and current computers, with up-to-date wi-fi
and printing drivers.)
- thinking forward, would a Puppy Box be desirable for running a Puppy SOHO?
(Like, say, a modified ChromeBox.)
So this is a take-off for Puppy SOHO, on a wing and a prayer, for now!
Wish us luck if you can't contribute or give feed-back?!
Best to all. BFN.
musher0