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Would you pay for WinZip?

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mouser:
it is *very* hard to get people to donate - it's just ingrained into all of our heads that some software is free and some is commercial, and it's very hard to get into a mindset where you give money when you don't have to.

i think this site is already making progress towards building a community of users and coders who support each other, but clearly we have a long way to go.

m_s:
Getting a little personal: I'm a Buddhist, and have lived and worked within a Buddhist community for the last ten years, and I must say that it is the economic model of donationcoder that has attracted me even more than the topnotch software and excellent reviews.  I'm fascinated by the idea of donationcoder, which I consider a reflection of the Buddhist precept of dana or generosity. 

Veign:
Maybe you should create a Press Release section where you create press releases on various Donationware applications or just in general about donationware and distribute these to various news places (like CNET).  The press releases will have to be very well written and maybe you could get some really good exposure.

Basically make people aware.

If this is something that interests you (mouser) you can email me - some of the PR stuff I have is not for public eyes.

mouser:
thanks for those comments m_s -
i should say that there are tons of people making their software available for free without fanfare, and of course tons of people devoting their lives to helping people.  i don't want to pretend like what we are doing here is some great thing.  if i could afford to work on this site and not ask for money, i would so much prefer to not have to deal with money at all.  i don't much like it, or capitalism, or all of the corruption and greed that this society seems to fetishize. my only desire is to be able to do what i am good at in a way that does not make this world worse, and to be part of a community.  i don't have any fantasy about making enough money from my software and this site to live on - that's probably never going to be an option - i'm just hoping that people continue to respond to the site in a way that will offset some of the work involved, and that we can grow the site and the community and be a resource for users and coders who want to try to make a go of this approach to software.  and i do want this site to be an example of the idea that maybe if your goal is not to extract the most money from people's pockets, in the fastest way possible, then maybe there are alternative ways to do things..  so i really do appreciate your comments.  and i do view you guys+gals as equal players in this experiment - and i expect you to help keep this site honest and on track with these aims.

veign - thanks i appreicate that - and i will be taking you up on that offer for assistance.  the one thing that we still have to do before i think we are justified trying to get people to take note of our site, and we are slowly making progress on this front, is bring more software authors to be part of this site in a more official capacity.. it might soon be time to revisit this issue and have another round of discsussions on the best way to do this that would benefit everyone.

mouser:
one thing i want to make clear-
i don't begrudge shareware authors trying to make a living from selling software -
in fact what i'm troubled most by is how impossible it seems to be to survive in this game by taking a middle ground.
it's depressing beyond belief that marketing plays such a huge role in sales; if you are a big rich company, then you just get richer because you can dominate the advertising and marketing.  it's hard for the little guy to break through.

wouldn't it be so nice if there was enough support for donation-based software that donation-based authors could actually spend their life coding software and survive on the revenue?  note i say survive - no one who wants to become rich is going to choose a donation-based approach, and that's fine.  but if we could get to a time where a software author could make enough to actually survive and pay pills and be even at the poverty line, i think you'd find a whole new world of programmers who would be more than happy to do that with their lives. and who would be quite satisfied having a community of users to interact with.

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