About open source

[torakiki]

I'd like to know some opinion about open source and free open source. I'm a great fan of open source software and i've my own project on SourceForge since March 2006. It's getting quite appreciated and it's downloaded about 200 times a day and about 21.000 times since March. I received 30$ donations since now. How is possible to survive for an open source project? i mean.. talking about those small utilities, libraries.. not famous but usefull and used projects, all those projects without IBM, SUN or others behind them. In my experience, everybody thinks about free sotware like "free beer" and not "free speech"...
I'm a bit sad about it because i recently changed my job and now i work 9 hours a day as a programmer and i've no time form my project.. i thought something like "I could work 6 hours and 3 for my project" but i can't do that for 30$ in 7 months.. this mean less quality, less updates, less features and so on.. and perhaps someone else will take care of it and will add some feature, but after 7 months he will find he has to work for his family and he won't have time for the project anymore.. and so on..
Ok, this is the question.. what about open source if everybody thinks about it like free beer?

[M7S]

I'm sad to hear that you've got only 30$ with 21.000 downloads, that's much less than I would have guessed. I would have thought that at least one person out of 500 would support a project they like with a donation of at least 10$. But I guess I'm just naive and want to think the best of people.

What is your project by the way?

[DoctorMO]

We program open source because we ant to fix a problem, to solve something that gives us grief.

Money is a problem but not the only one; if you had issues with your program you would fix them. the practicalities of open source mean others can fix it if they have issues.

I program for a number of reasons but one of the best reasons I program is because I care. I care about the community, about people and about software freedom. It's worth giving up the extra pay because open source is my real purpos in life where as work is just a solution to a problem.

[kripkenstein]

Well, if you have 200 downloads a day, why not make money the Sourceforge way, i.e. by ads? Set up a nice project page (buy hosting for this), put up some minor Google ads, and wait :). 200 downloads a day sounds like you should make some nice income.

Or even more, set up forums on the website. If your project is used by lots of people, they will want to visit the official forums often. So even a few non-annoying Google text ads on the forum page will be a source of income.

Think about it this way: the software is free. But the services around it aren't: specifically, the service of a convenient place to download the project, and a convenient place to discuss it on and get support. For those services, you are justified in getting compensated. Text ads on the website are probably the simplest way.

[Perfect Storm]

Try add a "Make a donation" sign, which can't be missed. It sometime helps.




But I agree it's hard to get people to contribute (either with money or help or a third thing) nowadays.

[frup]

too bad googles $1 firefox referals only works for windows users really. My website gets atleast $20 a month from that alone.

[Brunellus]

Free as in Freedom becomes profitable when it can be rolled into a package of services that a large enough customer would like to buy. Thus the Linux kernel is profitable to many organizations--because it powers the operating system which runs on their hardware, which drives their support contracts, and so on.

The program itself isn't worth anything.

In a totally Free Software environment (if such an environment ever existed), the price of using software would plummet to almost nothing--but the price of "supporting" software would probably go up. The big players in a Free Software environment would be guys like Novell, Redhat, and IBM, whose primary business would be selling hardware at industrial scales and supporting the same.