Warp wrote:
>   Does it make sense to buy something which will probably be free in the
> future? How many people would actually do that?

There's definitely no way to please all the people all of the time; I 
don't have any illusions about that. A lot of people will certainly just 
wait it out and hope the "other shoe drops."

At the very least, this is a good opportunity to find out what the 
public feels. And projects like Blender give me hope. I think overall 
more people need to try this style of funding; it costs the public very 
little in per-person terms but can provide so much more needed financing 
for software development (which is still an expensive undertaking). Part 
of my job is to help make people aware of where the value is, to not 
just state the message but to sell it properly, so yes, I definitely 
have some work ahead of me here.

To answer the question from another angle: eventually all software will 
be so commoditized as to be free -- the question is, how long do we want 
to wait? I think the person who can wait a year for OpenLev can actually 
wait indefinitely -- to them it's a "nice to have" but not essential. So 
I can't appeal to those people anyway. My audience is people who have 
real genuine needs today or in the next nine months who would like to 
move forward but haven't been able to budget $100 or more for it. If 
they have $20 or $30, they now have input. I think this is the beauty of 
a fundraising approach, that people who otherwise couldn't vote with 
their dollars now can, by really lowering the barrier to entry. I think 
PayPal even does micropayments (or will soon) but I haven't read up on 
that yet.

Ray

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