Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!mcdchg!mcdphx!estinc!fnf
From: fnf@estinc.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: PD Disks
Message-ID: <83@estinc.UUCP>
Date: 3 May 89 01:28:02 GMT
References: <1063@psueea.UUCP> <11572@s.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: fnf@estinc.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Organization: Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc.
Lines: 50

In article <11572@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
>I thought that Fred Fish did make some money off the sale of disks, albeit
>small. Maybe he's set up a non-profit corporation that I didn't know
>about.

Just for the record on this subject, yes I do make a small amount of profit
from distributing disks, when we define profit as the difference between the
fee charged for a disk and the direct cost of sending out the disk.  Even
at the lowest distribution fee I have ($2.50 each for orders of the entire
library of existing disks), with blank disks priced at between 69 cents
and about a $1.25, it would be hard to spend all of the remaining monies
on other costs directly associated with sending out disks.

When you factor in other costs, such as supplying several hundred free
catalog disks each month to new users who read about the library in
one of the Amiga rags (some send $1 or a few stamps to help offset the
cost, which helps), my phone bills and BIX charges which average about
$100-$200 a month, plus the occasional cost of new hardware like my
HardFrame + 80Mb Quantum which makes life much easier (great combo!), etc,
then things start to get cloudier about what is profit and what isn't.

Is the hardware profit?  Hard to say, since it is unknown whether or not
I would have the need for it without worrying about where to put all
this good stuff while I organize new disks.  Is the one or two trips
a year to various Amiga functions profits?  And these are only the
things that I can think of off the top of my head.  I'm sure if I 
consulted my books I could find other expenses which come out of
"profits" for which it would be hard to decide if the expenditures
would have been made if I had no extra source of funds to draw on.

We won't even mention the thousands of hours I have probably spent over
the last three years collecting and organizing the library...  :-)

As someone previously noted, if you put a statement like "cannot be
distributed for profit" in your material, unless you send it to me 
directly so I know it is ok to include it, I will probably reject it
when it comes my way.  In rare cases, if something is interesting 
enough and the author is easy to contact, then I'll check to see if
it is ok to include, before rejecting it.  In the "good old days" I
would probably have spent more effort trying to establish whether or
not I could use it.  Now all I have to do is look at the pile of stuff
I get every month (thanks everyone!) and choose something else.

Speaking of something else, I just finished off disk 210 this evening,
so watch for the announcement of disks 201-210 in the next day or so.

-Fred
-- 
# Fred Fish, 1835 E. Belmont Drive, Tempe, AZ 85284,  USA
# 1-602-491-0048           asuvax!{nud,mcdphx}!estinc!fnf