I was first thinking about making it a product for selling and making money
of it but that would mean a ton of work for me which i could probably never
finish.
I know all about that feeling. It is fun creating products, but support and
"selling" takes some of the fun out of it (though it also adds a challenge
that can be fun).
If I were you here is what I would do:
1) Allow the community to have a free beta copy for the foreseeable future
(maybe the next year or so) so the product can catch on and you can get
people submitting bug reports.
2) Put up a PHP BB (Bulletin Board) for support so users can help users
(load off your back).
3) After a year, release a more full featured version and charge
$25/yr/user. At that price everybody can afford it and IT shops wont think
twice about buying a copy for every developer in their shop. Make it
purchaseable via shopping basket so it isn't a load on your back. I would
still have a free version so people can try it out for free for an unlimited
amount of time.
In the end if you either need to charge for it or make it open source for it
to live on. If you don't make money at it then it just becomes a hobby and
most times will be at the bottom of the priority list (not what we the
community want).
Of course you could find some middle ground by charging for it and making it
open source to a number of developers willing to submit bug *fixes* (no just
bug fix requests). I for one would love to be a part of the coding team as
an RPG editor is in the top five applications I use most often in my job and
I could justify "giving away" time for it.
For now I will just submit bugs for the products benefit. BTW, this is what
I wish IBM would start doing with WDSC. I am guessing there are so many
politics that doing something as simple as a web-ticket would cause friction
amoung the factions.
Thanks again for this tool that gets me one step closer to 100% Linux
desktop. Now if I could just find a solid email/calendar software that
connects to Exchange well (Evolution freezes WAY to often right when I don't
need it to).
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
midrange.com
