Hi Bob, > I think a more important question is what does Aral plan to do with > donations. While I think OSFlash is a useful service, it shouldn't > cost all that much to run. The trac/svn hosting appears to be donated > by cvsdude... I hope so anyway, it'd be a shame if Aral was paying for > it himself.
The current costs are hosting for the site and wiki (which is being run well on the VPS plan that its on) and the cost of the CVSDude account. Neither of those will bankrupt me anytime soon! The real costs, however are time. I want to develop OSFlash further but I have been held back because I've been working myself (outside of time I essentially donate to talking about Flash and open source at various conferences -- of which I'm doing 8 this year) doing consulting/training to pay the pesky rent! So I've been thinking about how I can make it so that I can both develop on OSFlash *and* pay the rent and I believe I've come up with a solution. So here it is: As of now, I am going to be devoting myself to developing an engine to power an open source web site similar to SourceForge but much simpler to use. It has automated project signups, etc., and the core functionality from the current solution. OSFlash will become one category (the Flash category) under the projects that are hosted there (alongside other Adobe and non-Adobe projects.) In order to make it possible for me to work on this and pay the rent, I am going to create a separate site that uses this engine which will host commercial projects for a fee. Finally, if companies want to use this engine, they'll be able to buy licenses for it and/or buy it as an appliance. This should make it financially feasible for me to work on OSFlash full time. What does everyone think of this? I want you to understand what this means in terms of the things I *won't* be doing to work on this: I won't have the time to put my training courses online as I wanted to and I won't be able to work on the mobile games that I had started working on as well as the couple of other web app projects I had in mind to work on. Also, it will mean that I have less time to contribute to certain betas, etc. Is this community worth it? Hell yes! :) Again, before I commit to this, I want to hear your opinions as this is going to be something that I will be completely devoting myself to and I want to know whether or not I have your support in this before I do. Aral _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
