Hi everyone, I did a little searching around on the IPfire site and blog.
Is there anywhere to buy merchandise? I think a flaming penguin on my coffee cup would be great, even better then the debian logo!
The idea is cool! Why not sell some T-Shirts, coffee cups and baseball caps and more. That would promote the project and support it financially.
I’d like to see “swag” … but, there is a lot of up front BS (cost) involved. I’m more interested in supporting and telling others about the project. At this time, I’m only able to contribute by making suggestions, testing, submitting online contributions, and trying to help others…
I am VERY encouraged by the recent development activities. Several talented contributors have submitted a “f*ck ton” of changes and updates of late. I’ve seen a good number of critiques and suggestions in the Community forum, and the recent releases have made my implementation MUCH more usable and stable.
I’ve been enjoying protecting my modest little home network for several years with IPFire, and submitting suggestions / advice as best I can. I hope to to support the project with funds in the near future, and I encourage those who use this software to do so, too.
IPFire is an incredible accomplishment. I would like for everyone who has an online presence to use and support the project.
Hello,
yes, we would love to offer some swag, but plans for it were always put aside because we couldn’t find the right provider. There are loads of projects that offer shirts and other things that fall apart very quickly and unfortunately cost a lot of money.
We have also considered to use them as a source of income, but we do not want to be a t-shirt shop. We are an open source project building software and that cannot be funded by selling t-shirts - unless you want to spend ridiculous money on them.
So if you want to support the project, the best and only way is to donate: www.ipfire.org - Donate
Besides that, we can still try to make some swag. I would love to. Does anyone know where you can good quality for a good price?
I think no matter where you go the products would be a little expensive, a lot of gaming clans use CafePress.com
They require no money up front and only make the products when they are sold.
I’m sure there are others but that seems to be the one I see the most.
I believe I ordered a few things from them about 10 years ago.
Hi Michael Tremer,
How about creating a nice Flaming Penquin photo, sized for a coffee cup mug, then providing it as a thank you for making a donation. People could then download it and have their favorite sign maker add it to a mug of their choice. That way, no overhead or shipping headaches for you.
Please notice that IPFire Italia has just started merchandising. I like the mugs so much but shipping costs to Italy is too high… I think it’s a good initiative though.
hello everyone
I had proposed to do it just a few weeks ago, but from the responses I got the impression that it was not of interest, so much so that as an Italian community we decided to do it independently and donate the earnings to ipfire.org
surely there will be other platforms better than the one chosen, but somewhere we had to start
see my post
A marketing idea for IPFire - #18 by bbitsch
hi
you have to change the currency and put it in euros in that case the shipping is only €8.40, I know it’s not a small amount but we haven’t found anything better, if you know a cheaper platform don’t hesitate to report it, changing it is absolutely not a problem
when we made the choice of the platform we had compared the prices with the printerpix.it platform, which ships from the United Kingdom
and they are not very far from theirs
even in this case the shipment is always in Italy to Milan
I am very sorry to say this, but it isn’t a good thing to do this.
It has been raised a couple of times that we should do some merchandise and it has been discussed many times at length. We have however decided against doing this because of a long list of reasons. Here are a couple:
- For a start, we could not find a very good supplier which would meet our criteria. Those are except obviously having good quality products for a great price a provider that can manufacture in multiple places; at least in Europe and the US because those are our biggest markets. It is not feasible to ship anything across half of the world, neither price-wise, nor is this any good for the environment.
- This will bind a lot of resources. We are already very busy, do we need to have a gift shop? Things need to be designed, dealt with, there will be returns, exchanges and a lot of admin for zero profit. The calculations that we have done are pretty bad for us. Drop-shippers will collect pretty much the entirety of the profit and we will therefore spend lose a lot of money by having this.
- Then, we cannot afford to lose donations. I have heard this in so many places before where people were grateful for a piece of software and said things along the lines “Oh I should donate, but I would rather buy a t-shirt instead”. Obviously it is perfectly fine to buy a t-shirt if you would like one, but it is not at all there to fund the project. There used to be a time where this was possible but this is not longer the truth. So, if you have $20 that you would like for the project to have, you will have to donate them and not buy a t-shirt where we might end up with 50ct of all of it. You spent $20, but we have not received much of this. Those two things should simply not be confused.
- The actual design. I am very disappointed to once more see the tux being brought back. It is dead. It has died some horrible death a long time ago. There are reasons for it. One of the is that it is three-dimensional and has shadows. You cannot print such things on a t-shirt. It will look horrible. It is also sitting on a background. The reason to phase out the tux was to prepare to have some merch with a nice and clean design and not a 20 year-old picture slabbed onto a little bit of fabric. The feedback that we have received on our new design was foremost great. It got a lot of praise from lots of people; on the other hand, some people have taken their negative feedback too far on this very forum. This is absolutely playing a role in why I didn’t want to have another debate on what colour the mug should be. Maybe black? no everybody has black. Maybe white? No that is too bright for the people who are on dark mode 100% of the time now. Hmm, maybe pink? But is it the right shade? Or maybe something else? See I could go on. The design is the design. And I would like that people will finally accept this if they don’t have anything productive to add to it.
@tratru, please make it very clear on the page, that this shop is an unofficial merchandise shop. We cannot be affiliated with this, because it simply is not our shop. You are also missing all requirements that it takes to run an online shop in Europe, no address, no contact to the seller, no nothing. There is definitely not a “new” IPFire logo coming and there is no more tux.
Sorry @ms I didn’t know that this had already been discussed in the past and rejected. I just wanted to notify about this new initiative that I found on the IPFire Italia website. I’m new on this forum, I guess I should have looked better for old messages on this topic before writing. I understand you points.
There is no need to apologise. It is hard as a team to have everything written down and logged as it is being talked about. We have a regular call and sometimes not all points are minuted and we have a meetup where we don’t have someone follow us with a pen and paper.
And I don’t under any circumstance want to say that everything has to be signed off by myself. This project is supposed to be an open space and allow people to contribute. It would however be a very good idea to talk about things first, because in the history of the project which is now over 20 years old, everything has probably been talked about once before. Sometimes that might be very far in the past and circumstances might have changed since then; very often, they have not changed. And even more often we might want to implement something, but we simply have to prioritise depending on available time.
Having merch has not been rejected. It has just been put towards the bottom of the queue because there are other more important things to do first.