Update: The offer is now over, no discount available anymore.

This was another disappointing failure. We sold a total of 45 support memberships in the time between mid-November and mid-March, which is a whopping 10% more than in the previous years, at a 34% reduced profit per license, resulting in a financial loss of 27% compared to the old pricing. What we would have needed for declaring this a success would have been way in excess of 1000 sold memberships instead of 45.

So the final conclusion after almost 2.5 years of trying all kind of incentives is that the paid support membership / community membership program is a failure and nothing we do can incentivize our users to behave decent, or even just rational out of pure self-interest. This even after more than 1000 people confirmed in in-person VSS meetings and online surveys, that this is what we should do and surely they will support us financially! I guess this is how our user “community” expresses sarcasm and I just didn’t get the joke.

There just seems to be no meaningful capacity for rational mid- to long-term thinking in this field, at least not in the majority of over 99% of our users. A big thank you to the ~ 0.5% of decent and supportive people out there though! Unfortunately not enough to save this soft win-win-win approach for everybody to secure funding for PTB’s future maintenance and development.

We will evaluate new options, but it is time to conclude that we are out of “carrots” to incentivize people in a soft and friendly way to behave in their own long-term self-interest.

-mario