Local Foundation For Grants

Start a non-profit charity foundation that has a somewhat narrow mission to provide grants/funding to specific activities in the local area.

Consider funding for the library as one cause to support.

How to fund the foundation - estate grants, donations, sell "local discount" cards that area merchants would accept. People can pay a fee to get the card which could have other premiums such as - early/late personalized zoo tours, tours of water treatment plant, tours of other county facilities.

Squid Box

Sell/rent/lease a managed squid box to consumer and small businesses. The bandwidth shaping could be valuable for a small business.

 http://www.squid-cache.org

Oracle Downgrade

Look for cost saving opportunities by monitoring which Oracle features are in use and recommending if a license/feature downgrade is possible.

While every Oracle shop has a different licensing agreement, there are substantial savings to be had from downgrading from Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) to the lesser Standard Edition and Express Edition (XE). In some shops, consolidating instances onto single servers is the answer. I've worked in shops that chose to abandon certain EE features so that they could run their applications on the cheaper Oracle SE.



Oracle's Multi-Core Factor in Licensing multi core licensing

It is conventional knowledge that in the world of Oracle licensing, one license is needed per processor, but multi-core processors are a different animal. Multi-core processor licensing costs have to do with the number of cores multiplied by Oracle's defined multi-core factor. For example, the IBM AIX (a.k.a. RISC) system has 4-eight core processors, which means that it requires 24 Oracle licenses based on Oracle's "multi-core factor", which is 0.75 for the IBM AIX system.

In this case the formula for determining that 24 Oracle licenses are needed is 4*8*0.75 = 24

The multi-core factor is as follows:

* 0.25 for SUN's UltraSparc T1 processors
* 0.50 for Intel and AMD processors
* 0.75 for SUN's UltraSparc T2 processors
* 0.75 for all other multi-core processors
* 1.00 for single-core processors

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Hosting Open Source as SaaS

I would be surprised if serving ads would pay for the hosting/bandwidth/tech support required to host some of the open source SaaS applications. This would provide huge experience at low risk, and absorb significant hours.

MantisBT is a free popular web-based bugtracking system that might fit the model.

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20081117
Teamwork is a Web-based groupware for project management. It supplies groupware, issue tracking, cost control, and document and project management features with fine-grained security in a friendly interface.

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200812
Team tasks does project management. There are others.

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20090331
Request Tracker is an enterprise-grade ticketing system which enables a group of people to intelligently and efficiently manage tasks, issues, and requests submitted by a community of users.

RT Hosting Plans
Gossamer offers four different hosting plans for RT. If you are unsure of what would be the best fit for you, please contact them with the details on how you plan to use RT.

Bronze - $125 a month
For companies processing up to 500 tickets per month
Shared Server - Dual AMD Opteron Server, 4 GB of RAM, 73 GB RAID 1 Drives, 64 bit Linux

Silver - $350 a month
For companies processing up to 1000 tickets per month
Dedicated Server - Single AMD Opteron Server, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB Drives

Gold - $800 a month
For companies processing up to 5000 tickets per month
Dedicated Server - Dual AMD Opteron Server, 4 GB of RAM, 73 GB RAID 1 Drives, 64 bit Linux

Platinum - $3250 a month
Unlimited tickets per month
Custom Cluster - please contact Gossamer for more information

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201101
Heroku. Ruby cloud platform as a service.