>> It's viable in a lot of other ways but it's not financially viable.
>well, you have a point. but looking at swfmill, the many other ways >shine brightly, imho: They do indeed but the business model of open source doesn't provide mechanisms through which these other ways are guaranteed to be supported and developed in a self sufficient manner like a successful commercial product would be through the receiving of license fees, a portion of which can be fed back to the development team to fund further development. >it also would be a nice way to >contribute in another way than to write documentation which i honestly >didn't have the time to keep updated in the past few months (bear with >me, it's on the top of my list as soon as i can justify spending a day >or two on it). Sounds like you're affected by the same problem - as we all are. We need to earn money to pay bills and that usually means spending time on revenue earning exertion instead of non revenue earning excertion - that's just how society works these days. Maybe open source would have better suited humans living 20,000 years ago in a "pre money/property ownership" society (Damn, it's a pity our species took so dang long to invent computers!) >anyway, since i'm one of Dan's house mates, i know he has spent >*significant* time on sawmill's development. far more than actually >using it -- he isn't a flash developer and most, if not all on this >list have used swfmill more than himself. >maybe we can work something out to make swfmill development more >viable for him or somebody else. I'd love to see Dan or any other fellow software developer rewarded for their fine efforts. The only open source developers that I've seen financially rewarded are people like Gavin King (creator of Hibernate) who created an Object Relational Mapping technology for Java which appears to be quite popular. He got employed or "bought out" by a company that wanted to "own" the technology - well of course that's not possible being open source but they kind of kidnapped the "driver" so effectively they can "steer" in the direction they want to go - almost as good as owning the technology. I'm not so sure that users of swfmill would object to paying a fee of around $50US for a license to use it. If it saves them a couple of hours well then it's paid for itself. I don't know how much this would break the open source model (and "the horse has already bolted" so to speak) but if there are 1000s of people using it then this fee could represent some significant financial compensation for Dan's effort. >mark Chris _______________________________________________ swfmill mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/swfmill_osflash.org
