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Hello: I have started to work on an analytic animations app, doing mockups using BalsamicIQ. First decide what exactly I want to build, how it behaves, before coding (once/week devo blog at visualphysics.tumblr.com). At this time, it is a one person show. Despite the solo nature of the work, I am paying for a hosted jira site. I figure I might as well get used to the process of writing down what I want and getting it done at the start instead of later. With other open source projects I worked on, it was clear from day one there was no money to be made from the effort. I was not charging for downloading from http://sourceforge.net/projects/quaternions/. If I could charge $100k per download, I would be a millionaire by now. There are only two web pages that link to that project (found by doing a search via line:url), and both are from sourceforge.net. Using the multimedia Java framework processing available at processing.org, I hope to someday build an app. I will then have to figure out how to put those up on google play, and with processing.js, perhaps a way to see it work on apple iOS devices. A minimum of a year to get to such a spot if I ever do. Once there, it is clear it is easy to charge for the software created. Some thirty percent goes to the gate keepers, but I could set the price as low or high as I like ($0.99 sounds reasonable to me, and I could have a free cripple as is often done). So long as there is one developer, the bounty all goes to me. I might be able to buy a lunch after a few years. Once there is 1) money and 2) more than one person, things would appear to get so much more complicated. Say one guy contributed one little block of code one time and leaves. Said code is then part of every subsequent release. Along with README and changelog, must there be a MONEY file? I know that the GPL does not mean the software can be used for free, but how does one make that clear? As Cyndi Lauper used to sing, "Money changes everything". I bet open source would be much less open if charging for software were easy from the start. Doug
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