Donation drive result

[Moritz Moeller]

Cyrille,

> On the other hand, Wacom has a pretty good deal (working both way, corel ships 
> bundles painter+wacom's tablet : 
> http://apps.corel.com/promotions/wacom_px/index.html?itrkid=ppup) with Corel, 
> obviously I don't know the detail of the contract ;) But I can guess that 
> they might be more than hesitating to help an open source project which aims 
> at competing with some products of Corel. But I might be completely wrong in 
> my analysis ;)

my experience with Wacom then was that they see any product that fully 
supports their pens a potential sales multiplier and therefore support 
it through their dev team (answering emails); and with free hardware, if 
they deem it to have potential.
E.g.. they threw a shitload of support & hardware at Pixologic ZBrush at 
the time (1998/99), even though that product had a tiny installed base 
then and the future installed base was completly unknown.
Wacom's product manager just saw the potential that ZBRush had as a 
sales multiplier for their products. Since ZBrush w/o a Wacom is like, 
er, pizza w/o tomatoes -- it works but the fun's gone. :)

Support is based on target market and estimated installed base. I.e. if 
your target market is professional users, you'll get support from Wacom 
with a much smaller estimated installed base than if your market was 
consumers/prosumers -- simply because the resp. product range is more 
expensive or cheaper, so the numbers for justifying free support (i.e. 
"return on investment") vary.

At the time, we had an email "hotline" to their developers and they gave 
us two A3 tablets and one full set of tools for free (Wacom still owned 
them but they never asked us to return them -- that's kinda how it 
works, I think it's related to tax laws in various countries).
The installed base of Eclipse was < 2,000 seats worldwide in 1998/99, if 
I recall correctly, and it was IRIX only (we were just porting it to 
Windows NT then).


Cheers,

Moritz