First, I'd like to thank Joey, Noah and Jeremy for providing much needed feedback on a related blog post. Thanks guys. It really got me thinking. What if instead of a contest we figured out how to do community funded bounties? Wouldn't an open, continual system of free software bounties be much a better idea than doing another contest?

Imagine if every Debian distribution in the world in the world was using TurnKey's build chain and collaborating with us on its development instead of limping along with various inefficient ad-hoc tools?

TurnKey currently doesn't get as many contributions back from the free software community as we'd like (our fault). I think there are two main reasons for that:

This blog post started out as a response to a private email discussion between me and contributing developer Eric (tssgery) whom recently developed TurnKey Observium, one of TurnKey's top ten downloads. Observium is very popular for a newly hatched appliance. It has the same number of downloads as Redmine, which we've supported for a few years now!

Eric wrote:

TKL has two big issues as I see it:

1. Marketing. You're the best kept secret of the internet.
2. Testing. Too many appliance/products to be supported.

Please note: This blog post is quite dated, for the latest updated info regarding usage of TurnKey Docker builds, please see the doc page.