Please donate!

Posted April 16, 2008 at 8:03 pm by Ricardo Kustner in General, Infrastructure.

Our standard email signature reads “Jitscale offers Service & Support, Development and Consultancy on business critical internet related platforms, with a preference for Open Source.” So in practice we deal with both commercial and open source software. In addition to those two varieties, there are more software models, especially software that is not backed by a big corporation. The development over the years is interesting.

When I came into contact at a young age with home computers, the only choice – as far as I am aware – was between games you could buy in shops and software distributed through computer magazines.

A personal computer made it easier for individuals and companies to develop software. Whether the developer expected some money in return for his services varied. When I worked with MS-DOS I once created a shareware programme that calculated available computer disk space, and I even made some money by sending a programme, which showed characters in bold on your screen, to a magazine (obviously subtly letting them know I was only 12 years old).

There was a period I participated in the so-called “demo scene”, where a group of developers, designers and musicians (and even “project managers”) created real-time animations to demonstrate what magical things could come from a computer. The results of our work were always free to copy, so everyone could see what great things could be created. The source code of our demo however was strictly confidential and was definitely not to be distributed, especially considering the tough competition from other groups. We spent a lot of money on our computer hardware and the usual final goal was to come first in one of the competitions. Sometimes some money could be won but the major thing obviously was the honour of winning and the gained respect from other developers who were also very good.

At one point there was a Spanish group that released their source code for free. That was unheard of at the time and we feared this would ruin the whole scene as it enabled less knowledgeable people to also create things.

In the world of UNIX, of which I have not experienced the first years development, there was a lot of commercial software to be found. But partly thanks to Richard Stallman’s “Free software” model, and later the development of Linux kernel, a lot of non commercial professional software exists today.

Mac has also seen an interesting development: from what I know from the time the Mac OS9 was available, there were no, or hardly any, developers who gave their products away for free; the only choice was between commercial software and shareware, which you could try and then had to pay for after a certain amount of time. With the arrival of Mac OSX, which is based on UNIX, came a real explosion of free open source software. There are now many professional open source OSX products available with little commercial packages offering a better alternative.

The latest trend in these developments is what I call the “Paypal donate button” model. Many of these developers still do it for fun but discovered they can nevertheless earn a bit by offering users an option to make a voluntary donation. I don’t know how well that works. I have noticed these donation options range from very simple programmes, where you wonder whether it’s appropriate to even ask for a donation, to large scale projects which require an enormous effort and time.

I wrote this blog post in my free time so I don’t get paid for it. Coming up with a good blog text takes time and effort. If you would like to read more of my posts in future, I kindly request you to donate some money by clicking on the Paypal button below. Thank you!