OSNews

I've a feeling that a lot of free software developers working on small project, such as yours, treat it as a learning experience and a hobby, to produce an application to perform tasks which they wish to automate and then to share the sources and, if they're lucky, watch it grow when opened up to the wider community. There are also those who are employed to code and hack on free software, look at Ubuntu, Novell, etc. for an example.

I accept your reasons for charging for the Aqua version of your application. The thing that really concerns me about releasing one version for free and charging for the value added one is what on earth would happen if everyone started doing it? In the linux world, where most of our software is packaged not by the author but by package maintainers i suspect that no one would really notice, on the windows and mac platforms, where a project maintainer is often also responsible for building and packaging their software, i'm fairly sure it would further hamper free software adoption.

While those of us who understand the concept behind Free Software see the freedom to handle the source code as its most important feature, most users of non-free platforms still feel that the number one feature is the price tag. They don't easily differentiate between freeware and Free software, in fact they have a bloody hard time understanding the differences. I've seen the problem in action with users getting the idea in their heads that it's better to use closed source spyware infested file sharing apps on the gnutella network than it is to use limewire purely because the latter has a nag screen and doesn't have all the features unless you register.

Good luck pursuing your value added model with Mac users, as you point out it's a very different culture and i'm sure apple people are happy to pay, maybe they would be suspicious if they weren't required to sorry if i've sounded a bit harsh, my comments haven't particularly targetted your project, there are the likes of x-chat and a few others, including NeoOffice and their fund raising scheme, which have caused me to sounds negative.