On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:43 AM, Steve Potter <[email protected]> wrote: > Howz about a donate button on the Flex website, as a company FRS are feeding > the future developments of PSDR back into the community as GPL software.
I think that donations work for an individual writing software on a part-time basis where the income (or lack thereof) is not critical. And it is possible that the software becomes so popular that the programmer can turn it into a business. But once you try to put it on a business footing, you need a more predictable revenue stream. I must admit, I am not a fan of the Richard Stallman model of cost recovery for software development. Software is labor and labor is not free. But then, perhaps we should talk politics and economics. Now *THAT* would get the ol' juices flowing here! > I am a frequent clicker of Donate buttons, especially when I use their > software and wish it to continue to be developed. You probably do that because you have a well-developed sense of value and fairness. You want to give value for value received. Some people, e.g. you and I, feel that way but it is a bit difficult to depend on if you need that to make your business survive. > > Deep impact will no doubt have a different funding model. Deep Impact *should* have a different funding model, one that permits a full-time development effort by dedicated and competent personnel. If it depends on part-time "as-available" effort on the part of volunteers, there is little hope of any sort of schedule. And there is one other thing that happens when you have full-time people working on the project -- the project progresses faster than just man-hours would predict. When you are working full-time on a software project, there is less time lost in the starting-coding process. You are keeping more of the project in your head all the time. You also tend to have more time-overlap between coders so they are able to help each other through those, "I have a bug but I just can't find it," periods. -- 73 de Brian, WB6RQN/J79BPL _______________________________________________ Flexedge mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexedge_flex-radio.biz This is the FlexRadio Systems e-mail Reflector called FlexEdge. It is used for posting topics related to SDR software development and experimentalist who are using alpha and beta versions of the software.
